


Frog in a Blender

by feldman, Thassalia



Series: Gammassassin [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Identity Issues, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Red Room, Super Soldier Serum, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-07 22:11:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 70,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4279791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feldman/pseuds/feldman, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/pseuds/Thassalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she notices Banner's attention she doesn’t discourage it, because he lives a similar lie.  Pretend this is safe, pretend he’s containable, pretend that unchecked aggression doesn’t tend toward slaughter.  She can give him that much, as easily as letting him turn her foot over gently in his warm hands and build a hypothesis that she’d rather he left alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> On the Left and Third coasts, two friends saw Avengers and said, "Yeah, this pairing is a hot dry forest just waiting to catch." A few years later they saw Age of Ultron and said, "Oh honey no, that's _not_ how that went down." Then six weeks of fever dream later, they'd written this and tumbled back into fandom.
> 
> What's red and green and goes 100 mph? Set after Winter Soldier, tacking off into AU from there.

It starts with Banner’s eyes sweeping over her high-heeled ankle boots on a day when she's in a tailored pencil skirt. It makes her smirk; she suspects he's avoiding the obvious. But the looks continue no matter how she’s dressed or done-up. Watching him watch her becomes a small game, another exercise to keep her hand in. He always looks, arms half-crossed, worrying his lip between his finger and thumb, making notes in his head. It's humanizing. Weird, but human. Like the rest of them.

At first, she suspects a classic foot fetish. She's leveraged that a time or two with disposable fuck-me pumps and a strict interpretation of the term stiletto because the last thing she wants on a pair of Manolos is vitreous humor--that stuff just bonds to leather.

She’s learned to recognize the symptoms, though, and they don’t seem to jive with the looks Banner’s giving. It’s possible that something as mundane as an arch-inspired erection could be nirvana to a guy who spends so much time keeping himself in check, but control issues aside, fetish doesn't seem to be his bag.

She thinks about breaking out the good heels, but she’s not willing to simply entertain herself by teasing him without more recon.

She puts bare feet on the coffee table one night, though and he forgets to hide his interest.

Tony is in a heated devil’s advocate discussion with Steve over at the bar. Steve is refusing to watch known bad movies, Tony insists that this leaves gaps in his pop culture education. She’d tuned out after something about the ‘hero monster of Tromaville’.

Bruce’s focus is so sharp that she decides it's time to test her theory. She swings around and sets her bare foot between his legs. He's warmer than she expected, and he makes a noise that sounds wanting, but he's not hard. Instead, he wraps his hand over her instep, transferring some of his heat, and strokes his thumb over the first metatarsal. It's her turn to gasp, to realize how rare touch is between them when no one is bleeding.

"Your feet," he says. "They're perfect."

"Like _101 Dalmations_ perfect," she asks, voice lower than she expected, " _Silence of the Lambs_ perfect? _Story of O_ perfect?" Sue her, there's a lot of dwell time at the tower.

He's still holding her foot, and it's still very close to his cock, although he's moved it slightly away so it's not pressing directly against him. "Surprisingly perfect," he says. "I've been thinking about that."

It's clear that he has been thinking about it, as he lapses into silence without elaborating. He keeps her foot cradled between his hands, clearly taking her offer as permission, and assesses it like a mechanism. He skims the bony landmarks and gauges the flexibility of her toes. His touch is deft and detached despite the surprising heat of his fingers. It's less clear what exactly he's been thinking about it until he pushes his glasses back up to look her in the eye, "When did you go en pointe?"

She catches his thumb in the grip of her toes. "It's probably in my file somewhere." Natalia's growth petered out early, and while she wasn't lithe she was strong and up to resisting gravity. She's not exactly sure when real ballerinas are supposed to rise onto their toes, but she suspects it's later than any of the girls she'd shared a barre with. Real ballerinas also didn't train on the lifts and carries. "It's been a long time."

He eyes the turnout of her hip, the line of her leg stretched from her end of the couch to his. "Surely not that long, though you wouldn't know it to look at your feet."

He opens his hands, and she withdraws her foot back to the coffee table. There are a thousand questions he's not asking, about her training, the history she'd alluded to casually in a tin-roofed home half a world away, perhaps questions about his suspicions. He lets the first unanswered question lie fallow alone.

~*~

To be perfectly honest, she catches him watching because she always keeps a weather eye on him. Risk management, asset management, and not a little curiosity.

After SHIELD fell it had taken Maria less than a week to retrench, secure funding, and begin bringing in assets from the cold. Of the factions scrabbling out there in the mud of both internecine and guerrilla conflicts, Natasha chose her team out of loyalty. Regimes fall every day, she'd said, not realizing yet another of her homes was built on shifting sand, but she stood by the sentiment: loyalty to people over institutions.

It was a lesson hard-learned and driven into her bones. In the aftermath of congressional hearings and social media whiplash, she had gone with the few real connections she valued. Aligning with an emerging oligarchy also kept more options open than not.

Laura had winced at that point, but Clint had simply nodded. He'd married up into the middle class with her, and even after years it still gave off little culture shocks at the oddest moments.

She sat at the kitchen table with Clint and they made a list of pros and cons. The pros weighed heavier for Clint; his face hadn’t been splashed all over the media, and his own secrets had been buried far enough off the grid that they could happily remain in a farm on Parma, which was what he cared about.

“Where else are you gonna go, Nat?” he’d asked, serious even after their pros list had deteriorated to not having to pay her electric bill for a year. He wasn’t wrong. Plus, she functioned better when she had a clear purpose.

So she'd gone to the tower with Clint, and been surprised to find the rest of them pre-assembled. She'd been expecting Steve, hoping, considering it the best case scenario if the Winter Soldier didn't want to be found just yet, to kick that can down the road a little farther. Thor was passionate, but his investment varied. Stark was always going to be a broken toy, but he felt less brittle. That Banner was still in the tower actually surprised her. No. That he was still in the country surprised her; once the location narrowed down to US, it was a given he'd be in the tower.

Clint had peered out of windows the size of airplane hangar doors, scanning Manhattan laid out like a circuit board in the dusk, and said sotto voce, "Maybe Columbo just had a few more questions."

~*~

Stark was big on talking points while Steve offered strategy but it was Banner who summarized, "We came together to keep people safe. We don't need SHIELD to do that."

"Goals," she'd said, looking around the room and dismissing the agenda on her tablet. Fucking Stark and his agenda. She could picture him smirking to himself when he typed it up, assigning everyone codenames at the top: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Hammer, Arrow, Spy. With the period at the end, as if also abbreviating Spyder. "We need to focus on goals."

It took well into the night, less like brainstorming than a massive bitch session of all the ills that needed to be met head on by the world's greatest hardheads. She got a feel for how each of them thought and let herself have a moment of, not pleasure exactly, but security. Not because of the company so much as the process. She'd been floundering. This might be idiotic, but it was tangible.

"We destroy everything." Stark and Thor came at it from different angles, but arrived at the same conclusion.

"The Avengers can help with small stuff, security, safety, etc., but it's pointless without closing off the wormhole." Banner nodded acknowledgment at her as he said it, and his smile was just this edge of self-deprecating. Mostly, it was bright for her. She felt it wash over her, hadn't felt approval since Fury got shot the first time. She hated herself a little for liking it, but it was impossible not to bask in Banner's good graces for a moment. The alternative was Just. So. Fucking. Terrifying.

"We live here. We work. We train. We fight. We eat pizza. Everybody wins." Stark's endgame.

“New York pizza blows.” Clint called down from the upper level, where he’d been launching paper airplanes through Stark’s holoscreens. Some had been cryptic notes to Nat, others had been poorly folded just to annoy Tony. “I vote chicken and waffles.”

"We live here, we make decisions, we try to make things better." Steve agreed. It beat the reality show someone tried to pitch him while in line for a gyro the other day. “I also vote chicken and waffles.”

Stark shifted a bit more vertical in his chair and flung an arm out to activate more holoscreens than anyone could parse after so many hours. "Banner and I, we've been working on some ideas."

Now it was the Doc's turn to bask a little, and Natasha wanted to laugh at the twist of bitterness in the sunshine. Tony fucking Stark, taming the beast.

In the end she volunteered her skills, pledging along with the other five something like allegiance. In their own ways they all understood her loyalty, based in outrage at HYDRA’s manipulation of the safe haven she thought she’d found. She was amped despite the long night of hashing it all out; she’d tapped a deep well of slow burning anger that now had a channel. That connection felt so visceral that when they finally did give in to Stark's pestering for pizza, she sat beside Banner at the slate bar top not quite sure what to say, but weirdly comforted by his presence.

He passed her the red chilli flakes, she handed over the parmesan, and when he leaned over and murmured, "I know where Tony keeps the good booze," she didn't even tell him that this was the first thing she'd scoped out on the surveillance logs. Asset management, after all.

It’s all about the eyes; what they check, what they avoid, what they dilate to see more of. Know your enemy, know your team, prepare for them to be one and the same--except in this case, she has to pretend, live like she believes no one in this tower could turn into her enemy.

So when she notices Banner's attention she doesn’t discourage it, because he lives a similar lie. Pretend this is safe, pretend he’s containable, pretend that unchecked aggression doesn’t tend toward slaughter. If he wants to look, she'll let him look. She figures she owes him that much. She can give him that much, as easily as letting him turn her foot over gently in his warm hands, and build a hypothesis that she’d rather he left alone. It doesn’t hurt her to let him wonder, any more than it had hurt to let him touch. That, in fact, hadn’t hurt at all.

They start going out on small missions, intel recon really, leaning hard on the subtler Romanoff and Barton skillsets. Nothing pointy or explosive, nothing requiring her burn of rage, and certainly nothing requiring a two ton ball of ire. It’s easy to return Banner’s surveillance in those situations. He’s in the quinjet distracted by headphones, or tucked into his lab working on something with a focus so acute he makes Stark look like a fifth grader with ADHD. She keeps her gaze on him, working the offhand puzzle of pulling some kind of truth out of his tamped and tempered habitus.

Then they get wind of something out of Estonia.

~*~

In Manhattan they'd pointed the Hulk and pulled the trigger, but that situation had been obvious. Banner had chosen to push upstream through the evacuation and rolled up on a motorcyle already out of bubblegum. See Chitauri. Kill Chitauri and the space whale corpses they rode in on. Squelch the puny god who caused so much trouble in the first place.

Estonia is different. It’s a bigger target than their intel had indicated, but not what they had prepped for, and they’re neck deep before Steve can get them redeployed.

They still can’t always work around the myriad ways in which competing intelligence communities’ layers of lies and secrets sometimes hold some very ugly truths. Sometimes it’s about global conspiracies, but this time it’s about terrible people doing horrifying things while the authorities aren’t looking, and the neighborhood keeps their head down because a few years of independence aren’t enough to root out half a century of survival habits honed under tyranny.

They never figure out what makes Banner snap. He's been all over the world: witnessed people trafficked, used, left to die because those with resources felt it wasn't worth the cost to do better by them. Maybe something said over comms slips past his guard. Maybe an unlucky piece of shrapnel brings out the self-protection instinct. Fortunately it’s an intense burst that burns out quickly: he rips open most of the bunkers, yanks apart a 47 ton T-90 tank which audibly makes Stark choke up with some undefined emotion, then tears off across farmland into the sunset.

Thor follows like a tornado tracker and finds him roaring on the edge of a ditch between fields, a scrappy old farmer standing her ground with nowhere to run as a couple of teens huddle behind her for protection.

Without slowing, Thor gets in a lucky shot batting him away from the ditch. Or maybe the rage just has nowhere to go out there in the hills, and the Other Guy takes Mjolnir to the side of the head like a lightning strike, crumpling down into his muddy peachy self. They wrap him in a couple shock blankets to evac him because no one had thought to bring a change of clothes.

Natasha sits on the floor of the quinjet with him as he sleeps for hours, face bruised and drawn.

Her leg begins to burn, piercing through the numbness of exhaustion, and she takes off her boots. She has a gash down the side of her leg, a miscalculation while fighting across rubble, and she should probably at least get the bits of uniform out of the wound.

Banner's eyes open and he sucks in a wince as he watches her poke. "Don't," he says softly, like she’s probing at him. "You'll...it could get infected. It'll scar. It's not..." he trails off. She has a ridiculous urge to pull his head into her lap. She doesn’t. She’s just palmed a superfluous bone chip.

"I fucked up out there," he says.

"We got lucky," she shrugs.

He struggles to sit upright. "Been a long time.” He’s getting his voice back.

"Not sure how modest you are Doc," she warns, "but those pants were trashed. Thought you should know."

She's not concerned with seeing the lean stretch of his legs, the spare and human iteration that remains after the rage. There was something about the sight of his bowed back in that field, smooth when so much of him is hairy, the way he'd looked so damned cold and small out there. The bigness of his humanity seems to deaden her fear of the Other Guy.

She knows that probably isn't healthy. Fear keeps you alive.

He watches her peel away the tattered pant leg. Rip-resistant fabric hadn’t been a match for hitting a sprung end of rebar at speed, which had jammed down into her boot and jarred off her ankle bone. She has a shallower gouge where she’d wrenched the leg free at a different angle.

She thinks sometimes she can see him parse thoughts at a handful-per-second rate, his expressions interrupting each other on his brow. He shoos at her to sit up on a jumpseat and grabs a field kit from a pocket of webbing underneath it. He settles onto the floor cross-legged, draping the blanket around his hips to pool across his lap. He strips off her technical sock and cleans out the wound, which is still seeping blood but has already healed from an avulsion to a simpler gouge. Aside from the blanket and the leaves in his hair, he wears only nitrile gloves and a look of concentration.

“So I hear you may be getting a uniform.”

“Ah yes." He's distracted, probably considering the merits of stitches as he irrigates the furrow with saline, "The Britches to the Future project.”

“Oh God, Stark.”

Stark interjects from the cockpit. “Hey, that’s all Pepper. I call it Project Spankypants. Our t-shirts say, ‘PS, I love you’. I’ll get you one.”

Clint begins making a case for his own shirt while Bruce continues to treat her leg. He scowls when she declines the bandage, so she humors him. She picks the leaves out of his hair while he winds it around and wonders how he can seem so fucking vulnerable, and so determined at the same time.

“Maybe he’ll emblazon Hulk across the ass in gold,” she says as she sits back, only half joking, nudging against his rib with her uninjured heel. They’ve been watching a lot of WWE with Thor. She wouldn’t be surprised to see customized wrestling spankies appear with everyone’s name on them one day.

He swats her away offhandedly, but that just makes the desire to prod at him worse. What’s wrong with her, she thinks, poking a snake with a stick? But he’s not a snake, not a monster, and he’s not gonna do a lot more than what he does as her toes press again into the hard bone of his rib, the silk of his skin where the waist starts. He folds his other elbow down, pinning her as he pulls the bloody gloves off into an inverted little package, and she realizes that they’ve been playing a hell of a lot of footsie.

He finishes wrapping, one hand smoothing the bandage while he extricates her other foot. He brings her ankles together, and then curves his hands around the solid muscle of her calves. Interesting. They’re moving up from pedi-philia. He rises up on his knees, and she wonders, a little deliciously, a little deliriously, how far his hands will wander. His thighs press against her shins, trapping the blanket between them, and he leans into her space, forearms flanking her hips.

“Thank you,” she says, “for bandaging me up.”

“Be nice if you stopped getting hurt,” he says, close so she can hear the low hum of his voice over the engines. “But you heal pretty quick.” His curiosity is sharp, peaky and coppery, ripe as the scent of his post-Hulk body. She likes it as much as she likes the press of his wrist bones against her hips.

“Doc,” Clint calls from the pilot seat, amused, “Stark is calculating exactly how many letters will fit across your ass. He’s extrapolating what they’d say if they stretched.”

"That's ingenious." Steve pipes in sleepily from where he's been sprawled napping since takeoff.

"Don't flatter him, son." Clint uses his fifties dad voice. "He stole the idea from the Mad magazine fold-in."

Banner hangs his head and mutters, “Motherfucker.” She realizes how rarely he swears for a man half-made of rage. He pulls the blanket around his glutes, sits back down, and says, “Tony...” in a disapproving way that peters out as he rubs at his forehead.

~*~

Kicking out her frustration against the heavy bag first thing in the morning had calmed her, the tension seeping out with the sweat and leaving her hungry. She's still trying to figure out who she is in all this, restless and ill-defined.

Some days, she spends hours creating elaborate backgrounds that she doesn't have any use for. Sometimes she takes them out to play, applies for menial jobs in different parts of the city, the country. Fakes her ID and her background to work for a week at Duane Reade, or Yogalliptical, or Accountemps. It's boring, and probably dangerous, but there's not much else to do except endless research and training in the time between missions. The last time she risked a solo gig, it turned out that all that worry about her past's heavy grudges coming back at her was justified. She's got a scabby seam across the back of her ribs to prove it, a shallow stab she’s passed off as a scrape, itchy where it dips under the sport bra.

She doesn't know when Banner started running, but he's at the kitchen island, hair curly with sweat and a little punchy from endorphins. He’s trying to figure out Stark's newest blender, a workshop prototype, because it was affront to God and Man for Stark to just buy a VitaMix like everyone else.

Banner's wearing sweats so old he may be their third or fourth owner--they’re a muddy color that could have started out a bad shade of black, red or brown--a baby blue 2011 World Cup t-shirt with the arms cut-off, and a head band pushed oddly far up his forehead. It's absurd. It's incredibly endearing.

"Hey there Rocky, nice get-up."

He glances up, takes in her own sport bra and black leggings. Her scars and stripes are impressive, but only a few of them are permanent. She has a redhead’s irascible complexion, cream and strawberry-milk, and while she tends to heal injuries whole and smooth, a rosy mark remains for a time. She conceals for civilian clothing ops, but she’s also revealed them to simulate fresh bruising when she needed the appearance of damage or abuse. She didn't bother with a cover-up since didn't expect anyone else in the kitchen.

There's a flush of pink on his own cheeks from the exercise, some curiosity too, but he doesn't rise to the bait. Instead he asks, "Do you know how to make this thing not produce soup?"

"Didn't figure you for a runner," she says, slipping under his arm as he holds the blender lid on tight, and pressing puree.

"Conditioning helps," he says. "I monitor my pulse, heart rate, speed, some other stuff I added aftermarket." He shows her a modified Fitbit with the purely goofy grin of the data nerd. "I kind of hate it. I'm thinking of running a marathon."

So many things to say to that. Are you fucking crazy? Why are you punishing yourself? Do you want a training partner? Instead, she stops the blender. She doesn't move out from under his arm, though. He smells good, sweat and spice and strawberries and chlorophyll from the smoothie, and maybe her own endorphins are still singing.

"I already lost a toenail.” He jostles around to face her, reestablishing some space between them. “Wanna see?"

Sometimes, being surrounded by boys, by this haze of masculine energy, makes her feel like the perpetual big sister, their keeper. She hates that, wishes that they could keep their socks, and their toys, and their aggression, and their fears, and their dick swinging, and their dishes to themselves. Other times, it's a bit exhilarating to think of harnessing that.

They tend to pair off for pissing contests: Thor vs.Steve for strength, Steve vs. Tony for smart mouths, Tony vs. Clint as the middle-aged men among gods, Clint vs Steve for nostalgic childhood anecdotes to horrify Tony into silence. Natasha and Bruce aren’t so much sidelined as they’re cast as the arbiters. Banner is the unspoken winner on strength and childhood horror, while Romanoff reigns on cutting remarks, and even more unspoken, human frailty. She is female, and short at that, her youth obvious without any of the anachronistic confusion that comes with Steve’s baby face. And manipulation of weakness is her wheelhouse.

Banner doesn't play into most of the competition, not for lack of testosterone, but from years of leaving no trace of himself, his things, his needs. He spends a sizable portion of his bandwidth keeping something feral under wraps. His potential mess is so big that it overrules the day to day detritus of living in a palace full of men. You see the Other Guy swagger and it makes the quotidian chest-bumping less than pointless, it actively takes the fun out of it. So that leaves Stark, Steve, Thor, and also Clint, who just can't help himself sometimes because he thinks it's all so goddamned funny, gods and superheroes all trying to out-piss each other. It makes for easy reading.

With Bruce, she has to watch for small moments, glances, gestures, and intonations to flesh out her internal file. She takes whatever slips past the gates, panning for gold among his nervous tics and swift stream of befuddled microexpressions.

Plus, aside from encouraging him to share in general, she does kind of want to see.

He abandons the blender and bends over to peel off a sock and shoe. She makes a note to order him some decent, moisture wicking gear. If he runs a marathon, he's gonna regret not thinking about chaffing.

His foot is pale, marked from the sock and the shoelaces grooved into his instep in a pointillist pattern. He puts his foot up on a bar stool so she can admire his prowess. A nail is indeed missing, a small raw socket at the end of the second toe. But the body sheds damage to make way for growth.

"Three toenails," she says, indulging in her own dick swinging moment. "We weren't allowed padding in our pointe shoes."

He puts his foot down, balance a little unsteady. "No wonder you're tough," he says. She turns back to the blender, and she feels him touch her back, along her ribs, where the knife slipped in.

"It's healing well," he says, moving closer, his breath along her shoulder as he angles down to better examine the wound. He puts his other hand delicately on her hip to balance himself. She's pretty sure in his haze of curiosity he doesn't realize what he's doing, but she can feel the contact point all the way through her body. “You’re very lucky it bounced off the ribs.”

“Bruce, you look like the creepy older brother in an 80’s teen flick. Back away from the deadly spy and get some decent workout clothes for fuck’s sake.” Stark breezes into the kitchen in a wide arc around the island, shadowed by Clint.

“I dunno,” Clint leans across the island as Stark turns, looking like he’d just manifested from thin air in a flex of biceps, sending Stark into a defensive crouch with a squeak of sneakers and a crash of his plate. “He makes the two of us look hotter, don’t you think?”

“Jesusfucking--I’m getting rid of all the corners, no more goddamned corners, Barton.”

~*~

Clint spends less than a third of his downtime in the tower, but makes up for it by making his appearances random. You’ll turn to get a glass of the pride of the Catskills from the tap, turn back and Clint’s sitting on the bar placidly eating a banana at you.

It’s summer vacation, and Laura and the kids are staying with her sister’s family in Manhasset while the first trimester kicks her ass. Clint cooks for the whole house while Laura spends most of her conscious hours eyeballs deep in AutoCAD, hammering out rebuilding plans and banking productivity for the newborn year coming up.

It gives Natasha breathing space to crawl the SHIELD data dump for any indication that the farmhouse upstate is compromised. The kids think it’s hilarious that their aunt’s place doesn’t have a high tech bunker accessible from five points around the property. Kids these days, what are you gonna do?

~*~

Pepper was responsible for the pants.

It was before even Steve had moved into the tower. Bruce had been leaning into a couch corner watching the sky with a book open on his leg when the elevator arrived and Pepper came home. He held off on pleasantries when he saw that she had doffed her public face, and he thought about leaving her the room, but she waved him off as she headed straight for the bar.

“Would you mind terribly,” she ducked down and gathered items, “if I just talk shop at you for about half an hour? It might get ranty, but I just need you to hum in agreement every now and then.”

“Um.”

“Don’t feel obligated, I can also decompress in an empty room, I just really like the view from here.”

“No, that’s--feel free,” he eyed the hotel pan she carried against her hip, “Would you--can I help with anything?”

“You’re fine. I’ve got a system.” She shucked her jacket and sank down into a chair, pan poised between her hands at knee level. “I’m going to start; last chance to leave.”

He was frankly fascinated by this point. He nodded and hummed in agreement.

Pepper unpacked a pitcher and a bentwood box of supplies from the hotel pan, leaving a layer of ice at the bottom which she dumped water into. As she worked, she unleashed what started as a tirade about everything that had happened since 4am. She pulled off her heels, waxing vicious about international banking law, and peeled away an array of socklets, moleskin, and toe pads, revealing red wheals and at least two places that had blanched alarmingly ischemic. She slid her feet into the ice water and then collapsed back into the chair with her eyes closed. Her monologue shifted, gaining bullet points and counterarguments. Her toes stretched and flexed in the ice water as inflammation gave way to analysis.

Bruce had entirely forgotten to hum in agreement, but Pepper sailed on regardless.

She moved on to agendas, calling up JARVIS for secretarial as she dried and tended to the day’s insults to her feet; salve and moleskin and lotion and some frankly coldblooded work on the plantar fascia. She coasted to a stop with, “So now you know how the sausage is made. Sorry.”

He waved it off--he wasn’t a foot guy--but he did have to ask. “Is this normal for you?”

“This is not the pair I’d’ve chosen for today, had I known. But yeah, I do pay a price in flesh.”

“So all of that,” he indicated the discarded padding rolled up discreetly into the towel, “That’s standard?”

“Good equipment saves your skin.”

In retrospect, he’d just felt the need to reciprocate vulnerability. It was the first thing to come to mind, and he knew the moment it left his mouth that he’d run right off the road of socially acceptable, but it was nearly impossible to gauge that line in the Lagrange point between Potts and Stark. It’s just...no one had ever dared to ask. So he told her the secret of the Other Guy’s pants.

Which is how the Britches to the Future project was assigned to two select staff at Stark Industries Materials Research Group, Cleveland (a fiber chemist and an HR clerk who did costuming for local theatre).

~*~

When Clint tells Nat the secret to the Hulk not bobbling his tackle at every window he swings past--tighter pieces rip apart at the fiber level and incorporate into the skin “like a tree growing through a chain link fence”, which sheds off on the return trip leaving him covered in pulverized pants and skin dust--she treasures that information like a ward against intrusive sexual thoughts.

Which works, until it doesn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

“Whatcha doin’?” Clint puts a beer down in front of her, and then lays himself across his desk. Stark got them all desks, but Clint outfitted his with a pillow. 

“Trying to pinpoint the origin of more aspects of this global conspiracy,” she says. But that’s a lie. She’s trying to decide if it’s worth it to moonlight at the Nike store in Times Square to get a discount on running shoes. The application is open, she’s trying to settle on a name. Jessica, she thinks. Jess for short. She has the money, but she objects to paying full price for shoes. She considers the giant billboard, and the prospect of her face getting splashed across it. Rejects the idea. She orders the shoes from Amazon.

“I’m really bored,” he says and flings his arms out.

“Go home,” she says. “It’s reasonable.”

“Stark has some new tech for me to try. I told him I’d give him a day. But he keeps getting sidetracked."

“So go bug him,” she says. She orders a pair of loose running pants, and some iron-on decals. Throws in a pair of Capezio professional tights in black. They’re $30, and she realizes that she’s never bought her own tights. She hovers the cursor over the pink option and feels a little ill. She can see her body in the uniform, black leotard, pink tights and shoes, hair scraped back in a bun so tight that blinking hurt. She’s too short, boobs too big, ass curved in a way that made the ballet master say something filthy, call her a whore in a strangely non-judgemental tone. He had no opinion of her sex life, he just thought her ass was too big for the corps.

It rocked her back, because she was never really a ballerina but she had trained hard, had risen up on her toes until they broke and bled, and did it really come down to the curves of her body bisecting her life into dancer versus killer? It was absurd to think so--you didn’t go from the Red Room to the stage---but once she went down the path, it was hard to stop asking why.

“Nat,” Clint says, the teasing whine disintegrating. “You okay?”

She nods. These are old roads with new signposts, and wallowing is for idiots.

“Did you hear what I said?” He’s sitting on his desk, leaned toward her over his knees. “I went to the lab, but Stark was in meetings somewhere else. The Doc had that cut-you-open gleam in his eye and he asked to see my scars. I told him I didn’t swing that way, but thanks, but he wouldn’t take the joke. I let him check out my shoulder, but he seemed disappointed.” 

She looks up from the laptop and he’s making the sad face that he uses to cajole Laura into taking pity on him. It’s different than his actual sad face, which is flat, expressionless. He’s giving her information, letting her know to be careful.

“People generally don’t look disappointed when they see me shirtless,” he pouts. “But, mileage varies, right?”

It stings a little--professionally, she tells herself--confirmation of the driving force behind Banner’s curiosity. He’s not sniffing around her knickers, he wants to know why she’s not a patchwork pony, had wondered if Clint’s the same. Is it SHIELD, is it tech, is it her past that makes her smooth and supple, bearing only the hardiest of the war wounds permanently?

Temptation flashes, faster than the impulse to sell shoes to rotten teenagers and smug athletes just to keep her hand in, to go into his lab, strip down to nothing, and dare him to truly explore. There’s a rush of heat, and as an antidote she envisions those damn disintegrating pants shredding like tree bark, but then she thinks of the wrestling spankies and a squad of well-built men running with a vengeance, their names blazing in gold decals across their flexing asses. That helps more than it should.

She hits the button for Prime shipping and shuts the laptop. “Let’s go punch something."

~*~

Afterward, she spends quality time in the whirlpool because the pain in her ankle feels gritty and wrong. She sits naked on a towel in the changing room, air drying and working the wound open enough to pull out another sliver of bone. The room is spacious and spa-like, but there’s a sharps container on the wall by the counter, near a cabinet of medical supplies. When she’d given Natasha the tour, Pepper had emphasized that unlike Tony, she felt medical care shouldn’t be done at a toolbench.

Natasha deposits the shard of bloody bone like dropping a penny into a piggybank.

Speculation that the Red Room had made physical alterations was baked into her file from the beginning, but Fury had cultivated a skeptic’s ambiguity about any enhancement, stating that he needed her to be a toolset, not a prize. They weren’t looking for Steve Roger’s remains just to repatriate him as an MIA, after all. So SHIELD treated her as a tetchy prodigy, and left a great deal of her medical file unquantified.

Clint knew. They’d become acquainted by dealing each other a lot of damage. He’d won, closer than was comfortable, and he’d spent his medical leave chaperoning her debriefing. He knew the prices acrobats and soldiers paid, and he’d tallied up her steep discounts with a compassion that disturbed her. He seemed to understand without being told that accelerated healing still hurt, that her dispassion and ability to move through it came down to training and repetition in setting it aside.

Then she met Coulson, and Clint’s leap of understanding made perfect sense.

She smoothes a fresh sock over the bandage and goes out through the studio part of the gym. The lights are off, dusk outside and deep gloaming in the room, and Banner is sprawled out on his back on the bare wooden floor in what she recognizes from Yogalipptical as shavasana. Possibly napping, possibly contemplating his compromised mortality.

He takes a glacial deep breath and speaks on the exhale, pitch sensual low like the voice of morphine. “It’s like remembering a dream. Maybe it is for him, too.”

He inhales just as slowly, talking around his lowered basal rate of respiration.

“Like one of those really complicated dreams with plots and working through equations, maybe.”

Inhale.

“I get sensory impressions, feelings, just enough to spice it up.”

She looks down at how he’s put together, and can see the Other Guy in the curl of his knuckles and the languorous thrum of pulse at his throat. Seemingly so vulnerable, but even Banner himself isn’t quick enough to harm himself.

“I can see that woman facing me down with a pruning hook,”

She inhales along with him.

“I could smell one of the kids had wet himself.”

Natasha shrugs, though his eyes remain closed. “Looked like a stalemate to me.”

_She’d crested the ridge with Clint riding shotgun and bounced down into a valley being filled with roar and oncoming storm. Clint had just barely caught the grab bar before being bounced right out of the jeep. “Christ, he sounds like an overtired toddler.”_

_“You’re just sensitive because you’re staring down another couple years of diaper laundry.”_

_“Change a #1,” Clint stashed his bow to hold on with both hands as she floored it, “and a #2 grows in its place.”_

His inhale is more carefully measured, and his exhale rumbles from his chest in the whisper of a groan, “I got lucky.”

She’s amused that he’s taken up her earlier point to use against her. She wonders if she can coax him further along, persuasion by trench warfare. She sinks down into half lotus, sore ankle propped on her other thigh. “I think the farmer came out on top. She went from babushka to badass in seconds.”

The chuckle takes advantage of his relaxation, bubbling up from his belly and punctuated with a fan of crinkles at each eye and dimpling back from his smile. His eyes open, brown like bread and pupil-less in the dark, but Natasha clocks the soft expression around them.

He confesses, “I think I over-chilled my back doing this without a mat.”

She rises and offers her hand, weight balanced, steady as he works through some unknown hesitation before lifting his arm. He fumbles until she gets the palm of his thumb in an arm wrestling grip and he mirrors it. “Plant your heels, flex at the hip,” and she rolls him up to standing.

He doesn’t open his fingers and she doesn’t shake him loose. She feels his pulse accelerate from the shift in gravity, vein hardening under her pinky with an uptick of pressure. “So. Were you contemplating your mortality?”

His glasses are in his breast pocket, because of course he does most of his activities in the same clothes as everything else. “It’s a very parasympathetic state. It helps.” After a moment he adds, “Thinking about death just makes me hungry.”

“That’s one of the standard responses, Bruce.”

He smirks and lets go.

~*~

She comes across Clint heading to the elevator with his bag, “Stark ditched me; I’m bugging out. I let Steve know he’s cooking for three.”

“He’ll still make a ton.”

“Full belly isn’t a bad compensation,” Clint steps into the elevator, “for the half of the team that isn’t gettin’ it on the regular.”

“Don’t be catty, Clint.”

“I’m just saying, enhancement seems to have a super cockblocking effect.”

“Fuck off home, already,” she tells him as the doors close.

~*~

Steve appreciates modern cuisine, but still mostly boils and roasts even though she’s gotten him a row of cookbooks and bookmarked the Food52 link on his datapad. Tonight, it’s chicken and dumplings and she’s profoundly grateful that no vegetables were harmed in the making of their meal. She’s got an Eastern European palate, and a soldier’s ability to swallow down anything resembling nutrients, but she still has a tough time with veggies that were once green, are now grey, and hadn’t been given the decency of a proper pickling in between.

Broccoli had been off the menu since Tony had constructed a diorama of the Hulk chasing baby carrots across the table. It hadn’t bothered Bruce, who just snorted when he noticed, but it irritated Steve to no end, between the waste of good food and the incompetence of the battle lines. They left unspoken that any strategy involving Banner was less likely to go as planned than even Stark’s tweedle beetle broccoli battle.

Steve hums to himself as he makes dumplings, a perfect line of dough balls marching across the stainless steel island. Banner shifts behind her to stir at the pot. The humid warmth of the kitchen, even amidst the hyper modern chrome and compact fluorescents, is still remarkably homey as the last of the sun disappears and Manhattan turns on full-twinkle.

Routines are powerful, she thinks, watching Steve rolling out balls of dough because he'd made a cooking rota and it was his night. She thinks of Banner breathing deep, contemplating the damage he caused and the damage he avoided. She runs through her own repetitions, crafting identities, job applications, a door-to-door in-home survey of all the humans she could have been and still could be. 

This is a room full of the damaged trying to make themselves better, who've redefined 'broken' to mean a temporary state to work back from, putting the normal back in abnormal. The three of them are both more and less than the sum of their parts and histories.

“Half an hour til soup's on,” Steve says, brisk and happy and parental as he fishes chicken out of the pot to debone. 

Bruce nods, downing a glass of water. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

She sits on the counter to be at easy conversational height for Steve, next to the resting dumplings, still thinking about those slow deep breaths in the near dark, and the steady pulse in Banner’s throat as he heard her enter the room and didn't even twitch.

Steve sets to work on the still steaming chicken and focuses on her.

“We need a protocol,” she says. 

His eyes get so shrewd and bright and chipper that the All-American gleam of him hurts her teeth. She reaches into the cabinet and adds peppercorns and marjoram into the pot to spite him.

“What kind?” Steve loves a good protocol, loves it when a plan comes together, even secretly loves it when they all fall apart and he's let off the chain to improvise by the seat of his trim bullet-resistant pants.

“The green kind,” she says. “I think…” she’s chewing on the analysis, but she doesn’t have the fallback with Steve of mutually understood SHIELD lingo, “when he goes into it with purpose and direction, he’s able to listen, and react well on the ground. When that’s in place Banner doesn’t come back so…”

“Broken,” Steve fills in. It’s not judgement, but assessment of the aftercare.

"He won't risk staying here if something like Estonia is the best case scenario we can offer." She points out, “And this time there is no SHIELD to run interference, keep people like Ross at bay.”

“Stark is working on contingencies."

“Sure, but maybe we don’t always want Tony’s kind of contingency.” Although, they offer a type of reassurance as well. She’s not against Stark’s iron warriors for the right job, maybe evac assistance, but SI’s Hulkbuster project had always been borderline boondoggle. The premise itself was a tender one that made Banner weary in a Cassandra way.

"Point. What are we thinking instead?"

“Entrances and exits,” she says “Transformational opportunities. The Hulk knows how to follow orders, and he chooses to follow yours. He wants hard targets to focus the rage on--he preferentially seeks out property damage and active opposition troops. But he needs help standing down.” She leaves out the bits about face-saving negotiation and unit cohesion and reframing.

“You're right that he doesn’t want civilian casualties.” Steve scoops the meat and settles it back into the broth. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” he continues, “for all of us. How to be better.”

What made her want to be better? What made her begin to limit damage for reasons other than stealth? She thinks of coming to the farm that first time and Clint handing her a sleepy infant, his firstborn, like plopping his beating heart in her hands while his wife fussed over the injuries Natasha had given him, and they both just expected her to follow up the porch steps behind them. She'd collapsed into an armchair, pinned down by ten pounds of gassy baby, and shook with the weight of responsibility and shame.

She thinks, surprisingly, of Stark, so consistently an asshole in part as a warning for others to manage their own expectations so that he won’t disappoint them. Steve, defying all of her expectations and being at her side when her world went to hell again, not believing her words but willing to believe in her actions. People who know who they are, have chosen their purpose, and have folded themselves with their best sides outward.

Trust, she thinks, down on her feet and calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be back for dinner. Let’s look at this with everyone.”

~*~

Bruce’s hair is damp and curling when he opens the door, cleaning his glasses with an ancient t-shirt, but he’s got on nice jeans, and his feet are bare.

“Doc, you know those jeans could buy you a small car,” she waits until he gestures her in.

He looks down, flash of guilt and rueful amusement, and then shrugs. “Every week, things disappear from the laundry and new stuff appears in my closet from Tony. I give most of it back to Pepper because I don’t want to look like the aging drummer in an AC/DC cover band.”

She barks out a laugh.

He milks it with a mock distressed furrowing of his brow. “Then he scanned me on another pretext and went the custom tailored route. Sometimes, it’s easier to accept things you don’t want from Tony than to tell him no.”

"That seems about right."

“Something you need?”

Trust, she thinks. She trusts him, or she’s close to it. It’s on the agenda--without snarky punctuation to blur the meaning. Time to see if can be mutual.

“Can you look at something?” she says, sitting on his bed and peeling off her sock and bandage before he can answer.

He sits on the floor in front of her, still careful not to loom, as if she could have gotten anywhere if she were susceptible to looming. He props her foot on his opposite thigh and studies it like a sceptre.

“It’s healing,” she explains. “But it still hurts. Better now that I've worked the bone chips free.”

He sucks in a small breath and for a moment his clinical touch becomes a humid palm curling reflexively around her calf. "I didn't expect that kind of desperate pirate medicine here of all places--but then with SHIELD in shreds...this is _accelerated_ recovery."

Every cell is screaming at her to deny it. Instead she gives him more context. “It would be fine by now if it had just laid open clean to the bone without hitting it. I had to reopen it earlier. I could feel something grinding."

"Earlier _today_?"

She’s not seeking medical attention, she’s offering the only gift she really has for him. Shared knowledge, shared vulnerability.

He stares at her, eyes sharp and dark and his whole self focused, and he takes a deep slow breath as he takes in her meaning, lips tense. It's not a question, "You were a kid, weren't you."

"I don't actually lie that often, doc."

"That's a different thing than truth, though, isn't it?"

"Truth is for soft science majors. Would you prefer evidence?"

~*~

He likes putting things back together. It’s satisfying. If he had other talents, maybe he’d work wood, paint, learn to golf. But his options are limited to activities that don’t cause accidental injury or disproportionate frustration...and for a few years his sole human contact has been therapeutic touch, safe and detached and useful. Lately, he’s spent a lot of time putting small parts of Natasha back together, something he realizes now is more for his benefit than hers, particularly if what she’s about to let him do proves his hypothesis.

ThIng is, he enjoys putting her to rights. It's not clinical; it feels like reciprocity and care. There is an undeniable pleasure in the feel of her skin, her muscle and bone, the intensity of her presence as she lets him work, her arid biting wit. She’s a cypher, but unfolding a little, letting more of herself out to play. Her smiles are less calculated, her attention sharper without the mask, her pleasure deeper and sweeter in character.

She laughs so hard at dinner when Steve describes the more embarrassing Captain America merchandising he'd found on eBay that he can practically count her teeth, and he has to quickly swig his beer when she catches him blatantly staring.

“We all had Captain America pajamas,” he confirms. “I bet even Barton did. Scratchy from cheap flame retardants. There was a cartoon, I think; I had the zip racer motorcycle.” 

Natasha is too young and too Russian and too much a woman with a stolen childhood to share any nostalgia, but she pictures them all in children's sleepwear, even Thor with his hair loosely braided for bed, in summer shorties and bare feet.

~*~

They’d lingered over dinner, opening wine with dessert and he wondered which of them was screwing up their courage. That’s a lie, he knew it was him. 

Now they’re in a little conversation nook in his part of the lab, because he wants her in a chair and not on a stool. He feels for a vein before tightening the tourniquet rubber around her bicep. Her face is bone white and all trace of laughter is gone.

He explains as he waits for her skin to dry after the alcohol wipe, “I’m not going to write anything down that can be traced back to you. I’ll destroy all samples using the same protocol as for mine. I’ve got a dedicated offline server.” 

She nods. “It’s fine.”

He’s pretty sure it’s not. He prefers the open smile but she’s offering that milk-opaque arm, laced through with whatever the hell the Soviets had been working on for six decades and shooting into orphans.

He hates giving in to the rage, hates that the main value he brings to this team is as a creature without reason. But the trade-off is this: minds to match his own, opportunity and safety to explore, a chance at justification for a life as a failed experiment. Maybe some answers Natasha hadn’t been able to ask for anywhere else. He could help people here, too. 

He uncaps the butterfly needle. She watches placidly while he slips it through skin and then has to pin the vein down with his thumb to keep it from rolling; he doesn’t breathe until a line of deep maroon races into the vacuum tube.

“Well I can tell you’re not anemic.”

“I wouldn’t know. They don’t keep anything from my physicals,” she says. “I don’t even know what my last blood pressure reading was.”

He swaps out tubes one-handed. He’d only done paramedic medicine for a few years going through college, but some things are muscle memory. “Does _anything_ raise your blood pressure?” he asks, then feels like an asshole. He’s pretty sure that he’s the answer to that question. 

He withdraws the needle, letting the remaining vacuum in the tube clear the assembly of blood. He sets a clean wad of cotton on the bead welling up on her skin, and flexes her hand toward her shoulder. He busies himself with the ritual of universal precautions and she watches him still, with tilted head, until he doffs the gloves and sits back down with a band-aid on offer. 

“It doesn’t have to be bad to get my pulse racing, Doc,” she leans forward, unexpectedly pressing her lips to his cheek.

He brings his hand up without thinking so his fingers brush her ear and his thumb rests on her cheekbone. Errant strands of her hair tickle against his knuckles. She gives him something approximating that smile again, and he finds it interesting that he can sense there are cracks in her confidence that she’s plastered over, and he wonders if maybe she’s allowing him to see that, too.

~*~

It’s just blood. She’s left it all across the world in splashes and drops, made up for the lack of menstrual tithe by bleeding from so many other pieces of her flesh and bone. But now it’s data, evidence, something to test his unspoken hypotheses against. It’s an offering, and she feels more naked than she has in years.

She commits to the path, without a clear role to inhabit, just the need to build trust. And yes, perhaps the itch of wanting to understand this part of who she is, by letting someone else see more than carefully curated pieces of her. 

She uses her café identity to get an x-ray of the ankle at an urgent care, paying cash in ones for a copy on disc. The tech flirts with her as she guides the joint into three different positions for the images, but the woman's interest never burns through the detachment of her touch. 

Natasha leaves the disc next to Bruce's laptop, on the spot where his tea mug usually sits.

~*~

Clint shows up for lunch and talks about the weather in one of their ways of touching base in front of strangers, though they’ve done it enough around the tower that it’s less of a code than a way to annoy the others. Right now it’s just the two of them and he slips out of code and decompresses about his in-laws. Natasha’s given him the all-clear to move back to the farm, but then Clint's hour by train would turn into a more traceable hour by plane plus airport traffic.

“But there’s only so much of suburbia I can handle before I start taking potshots from the roof.”

She laughs at his predicament and reaches for her cup.

"Oh, Nat, no--that's the opposite of careful."

She waits for him to clarify.

“Are you having a stroke? Do you smell toast?" He takes her arm and rubs his thumb across the gummy rectangles of adhesive left in the crook of her elbow. It would do no good to pull her arm away at this point. “This is not why I told you about Columbo’s investigations the other day.”

"I know what I'm doing."

"No, I don't think you do."

"He needs to trust us, Clint. I'm working the angle I have." Establish a rapport, distract the analytic mind, offer the subconscious indirect suggestions.

He takes her cup and drinks it at her, the strong sweet tea she takes hot even with the summer glaring in through the windows. "That's not what I mean."

"It's my secret to share."

"You know I know that. We were rock solid on that before I took you home. I trust your instincts about people and you trust mine. Hell, Cap'd known you for a few days tops and he trusted your people radar. Which struck me at the time as really stupid, but I'm coming around on his quick thinking in general."

"Then why the left eyebrow?" Coulson had been the one to catch that Barton not only raised each eyebrow individually, he used the right for incredulous and the left for insinuation.

"Because, _sir_ , that's not the only angle here."

"I wouldn't work that angle inside the team." She'd only went that direction once with any of them, when she first came to SI, and even then it had been obvious she had to play Stark against Potts like a child custody case. Or a mutually destructive three-way.

"That's my point. You're not working it like an angle. This is sloppy and awkward, Nat. Like something real." He ducks his head close to catch her eyes. “You’re a gifted performer. But have you ever done this for real?”

She takes her cup back and tosses back the dregs, sting of tannins and heat on her tongue. “I actually don’t even know.”


	3. Chapter 3

The package arrives the day after, and she wraps up the gift for Bruce in butcher paper and string from Steve's stash in the kitchen drawer.

The note on top of the workout pants and new running shoes and socks says, “You pronate, Doc. These should help your knees and toenails. Enjoy. You’ve got a date at 6:30 a.m.”

~*~

Her ankle is better, still creaky but the pain is clean and faded enough that she doesn’t want to baby it. She wraps it lightly before putting on the tights. It breaks up the line of her leg, but she tamps that concern down, filing it into past lives. 

She’d done her homework, found a studio halfway between a professional showcase and a holding pen for bored housewives looking to cardio barre their glutes into shape. It’s on top of a deli/pharmacy complex, with multiple classes on the hour. She shucks her jeans and boots, pulls on the battered warm-ups and snaps on the soft slippers. She’d scuffed them with plant dirt and scored the leather soles; it wasn’t anyone’s business that she hadn’t worn these delicate things in a decade.

A tall blonde woman looks over with a smile. “Marcus doesn’t require shoes,” she says, adjusting the elastics over her own ankles, “He lets you go barefoot, but it’s always cold as a son of a bitch in there and my toes cramp.”

It’s a friendly overture. Anonymity has it’s advantages, but this isn’t going to hurt anything. “Kate,” she says. Short for Yekaterina, but she doesn’t have to advertise her origins, her turnout is going to scream Bolshoi for her. There are certain things she’s too proud to fake.

She stands in the back of the class, proper etiquette for new members, and there’s a moment in the adagio when instinct and memory and muscle take over and she looks to the left expecting her fifteen year old self in the mirror. Instead it’s a bubbly former chorus girl who gets told three times to stop talking by the gay, black instructor. His lack of rancor is a revelation. 

She’s not tempted to giggle and gossip, but her first broken bone had been from the music master’s cane landing hard on the top of her foot. By the end of class, she feels a genuine thrill at the barre work, the discipline, the final moment of holding out until the resonance of the music stops.

They’re all pooled on the benches as classes change out, and the blonde waves at her. “How’d you like it?” she asks. “You’re really good.”

“I liked it,” she says, and offers a tentative smile. “I’ll be back.”

~*~

Bruce lays in a pile of sweat on the floor of the kitchen while Steve, already showered and sunny as a daisy, reads morning intel from Maria’s group and drinks coffee at the table like a civilized person.

She pours off a mug of coffee, generous with the milk to cool it down, and stands over Bruce.

“I hate you.”

“You know that’s not true,” she smirks. “How much farther did Steve run after you collapsed?”

“I’ll give him credit,” Steve says, not looking up. “He’s got stamina.”

“How do your feet feel?”

“Comfortably numb.” He sits up with a groan, leaning back against the cabinets, and she hands him the mug. “You really are a terrible person,” he emphasizes, but his eyes are bright, and she notices that the workout clothes fit him well. They’re soaked, but the line of his body isn’t compromised.

“Whatever, Friedrich,” she says.

In retrospect it was bizarre and possibly callous to make a guy who’d died on one side of the war and been reborn generations after watch _The Sound of Music_ , even if Tony sometimes referred to them all as the Von Trapp black sheep. But even Thor had shown up that night, in a holding pattern while Dr. Foster finished up at a conference, so piling into the conversation pit of couches and watching a Rogers and Hammerstein extravaganza about orphans and Nazis just kind of happened.

Russian. Pragmatist. Spy. She lacked the sentimental streak necessary to appreciate musicals, but she’d been entertained by Stark knowing all the words along with Clint, while Thor and Steve sat hypnotized. She suspects they’re both rocking a pretty hard-core crush on Julie Andrews right now, and she vows to keep Steve away from the psychedelia of _Mary Poppins_ and find him a copy of _Victor/Victoria_ instead. Everyone needs a little kink, and she’s working him up to a Savage Love podcast subscription. Banner had fallen quickly and completely asleep in their midst, head thrown carelessly back, the line of his throat a landmark in her peripheral vision.

“At the very least, he’s Kurt,” Steve corrects.

“I hate you both,” he sips, looking up at her over the rim of the mug, “and I refuse to look up the reference.” He takes in the thin straps of her leotard, her bare back flushed and rosy from the class and the walk home. “How’s the ankle?”

“Mmm.” She’s non-committal.

“Come down and see me this afternoon,” he says. “I’ll take another look.”

~*~

“I want you to know, I was very good. I ran as much as I could with the sample you gave, and destroyed everything using the same methods I do for my own blood and tissue. It's now just encrypted data on my offline server. I even destroyed the actual disc, by the way.”

She heads to the couch off to the side and props her foot up, and he lets himself be led to the cushion beside her. “Did you get the report?” She’d listed the requesting physician as Robert Greene, MD, care of the concierge office for the tower’s upper floors, and then hand-delivered the x-ray pathology report to his workbench.

“I assumed Audrey-whatever was you, yes.”

She lets him do the unwrapping, likes the strange intimacy of it. She had been so careful for years at SHIELD to be circumspect that the openness of this thing between them, confession and examination and negotiation, seems more sensual than medical.

He shakes his head and blinks, in mute conversation with his own thoughts as he moves through the ritual of inspecting her nearly healed injury. He hadn’t bothered with the gloves this time, and he’d pulled her foot onto his thigh where he usually sets whatever he’s reading.

“I was eight when the injections began,” she pitches her voice low and slow, bringing him to quiet attention. “The pattern became that each stage began with a dose, and culminated with a culling. The first years focused on physical conditioning. Acrobatics and ballet training can be pushed quite far, when the students just regrow cartilage and bone. Stamina and agility, strength and control. Finding good stock to work with.”

Her foot is now the focus of the customary touching and twitching his hands usually expend on each other.

“Martial arts, comportment, polytechnic and militsiya education, each stage there were fewer of us, each stage came down more and more to will, and brains. The psychological interventions began when I was fourteen. They’d honed control techniques on a related project, and they brought that in nearly wholesale.”

Distress is etched into his face, but it’s empathy and not pity. She levers her other shoe off against the bottom of the couch and gently slides the second foot under his knee. He glances down and his touch on her skin becomes deliberate, all pretense of the clinical abandoned in favor of an honest foot rub. “Psychological techniques?”

“False memories tailored to the mission, doc.” She can tell her smile misses the mark. “And wiping the slate as clean as possible when need be. That was my life for years, until I broke conditioning.”

He breaks eye contact and rotates her ankle, shifting his hands up to work her calf and ease the muscles that connect down into the joint. 

“That’s when I went mercenary.” There was enough in her SHIELD file to sketch the outlines of those years, and by now they’ve all done their background reading. “Agent Barton was sent to eliminate me. Which he kind of did, just not how he was supposed to.”

Bruce snorts, “Yeah, I’ve met Clint.”

“Clint knows; he sees a lot of things he then points out to you as if they’re obvious. Fury knew, and he took it all off-record when I joined SHIELD, buried it to give me a clean break. And now you know.”

~*~

There were...anomalies. He’d always had a pedant’s problem with the phrase ‘super soldier serum’, because even Erskine’s early work was a cocktail of growth and mutagent factors and stimulants paired with every bit of junk drawer tech Stark Classic could throw at the problem.

Bruce used the shorthand ‘serum’ because it was the convention of the field, but it had always been a generalized concept more than any particular formula. The work had evolved in fits and starts for decades before Bruce got into the field, and despite the best intentions of the scientific thought process, it’s like democracy--a really terrible way of doing things, but better than all the alternatives. There were fads and fashions in science just like any human endeavor. And while the effects were clearly visible, the traces he could find of what Natasha had been dosed with (repeatedly, chronically, at each stage through childhood to adult like vaccinations before school), they were very anomalous. No. They were anachronistic.

His initial analysis had concluded that the effects were subtler than the full Rogers, she could pass in ways that Steve had to be very circumspect to replicate even after Natasha had taught him how to use a contour palette to unchisel his jaw. He’d felt envy and relief at the lack of anything but the background radioactive exposure of living on Earth as a frequent flyer: the radiation part of the cocktail really seemed to be a wildcard factor no matter what wavelength it came in.

But psychological factors. Erskine had been ideologically bent on the pure-of-heart thing, though he did seem to have a wise old man’s eye for actually finding it after all, despite Steve’s filthy mouth when he wasn’t around a lady or a guy wearing a tie. Bruce knew better than anyone that psychological factors were damned hard to quantify or control for. So he is not surprised that there was a psychological component to what Natasha was subjected to, especially if she were like any other gifted highly-driven kid starting to push boundaries in adolescence.

But again it hits an anachronistic Clockwork Orange note. Given the fuzziness of her timeline, the spotty memory loss until she broke conditioning, the immense amount of investment her training represents...the ability of the serum to heal even grievous injury whole, though on a more human timeline than either Rogers or the Other Guy, he has to wonder.

He was fourteen in 1984, so he read the novel at the height of the Reagan era when he was safe at his aunt and uncle’s and reading anything he could get his hands on to occupy his brain. He’d also read Orwell’s _Down and Out in Paris and London_ , which probably explains a lot about how he chose to disappear when he had to. So he contemplates what he knows about Fury’s sense of humor, and the likelihood that Natasha Romanoff’s file is still probably 50% filler and outright bull, and he has to wonder.

~*~

It’s her third class, and the group of women has moved on to casual conversation as they linger in the street afterward. They invite her to coffee. Most of them have young kids in school, or work from home. They don’t really have a place to be yet. Half of them danced in the corps themselves, got too old, too tall, or too tired of being not quite good enough, but still loved being in the studio, moving through the room in a series of choreographed moments.

It was comforting, to relate to such strangers in something so small but vital, and she wants to savor that real connection before it's overwhelmed by these women connecting with her cover ID instead. 

She’s declining the offer when she looks across the street.

Banner’s holding two cups from the Greek deli, waiting for her to notice him like a broccoli hulk biding his time behind a water glass. He’s got a hat on and some of the new running clothes, and he looks weirdly normal, both for him and for just a guy on the street. She holds up her hand, like she’s waving to a friend.

The tall blonde, Jen, catches the gesture. “Nice,” she says, “My husband never does stuff like that for me anymore.”

“He’s not my husband,” Natasha says, but she’s already crafting him an identity to go with Kate. Robbie, because if she ever has to introduce him he needs something close. For all that he can disappear into various corners of the world, he’s terrible with aliases. A software consultant, does a little day trading, going through a midlife crisis and training for a triathlon. Divorced. No kids. Nice guy. Good in bed. A little selfish. Bad with money. Likes to cook. Travels for work.

“Boyfriend,” Jen says, “whatever. It’s sweet.” The others agree, move on to talking about dating in their former lives and Natasha slips away from the group, crosses the street, and takes the cup he offers. 

“Following me, doc?”

“I was curious,” he says, unapologetic. 

“Just getting some exercise.” She sips and it's not the coffee she expected, but a passable black tea with milk.

"I wasn't sure how you take it, so I just got two of mine in case you didn't like it." He presses the lid down on his cup, methodically, repeatedly, running his thumb around the rim. "The milk proteins bind some of the caffeine, makes it slower release.”

“Does that help?”

“Also, I like it."

"I prefer mine very strong and sweet." Which is true but there's a wince in her chest at how it comes off--Clint was right, the bastard, she only knew how to play this like a musical, not real life. "I'd fill my cup from the top of the samovar and not dilute it at all."

They don’t talk much on the walk home, but it’s nice. It only feels a little odd when it’s the two of them in the express elevator without the distractions of the street or the cups to fiddle with. He scratches the back of his head and crosses his arms into a tight tuck, falling into his own thoughts until the doors open and Stark calls across to them.

"Oh good, Beauty and the Beast are back."

"Weak, Tony." Clint intones from the loft above.

Stark waves a dismissal upward. "I stand by it."

Natasha turns to Bruce and gives him a warm lingering once over as he exits the elevator with an overly-accommodating dart to the side, "He's right, you do clean up rather well."

Stark points at her, "Romanoff's picking up what I'm laying down. You're a real Cinderella story, Bruce."

"Well," he does a small dance of rueful exasperation, "you burned all my clothes."

"And you're welcome."

"That make you his fairy godfather?"

Stark swivels to face Steve, who looks a little too much like an altar boy, straight blond lashes cast down as he thumbs through something on the tablet held in one splayed hand.

Bruce huffs a laugh between himself and Natasha, his shrug of shoulder and brow indicating another pissing contest in the offing, if she'd like to watch with him.

She goes into parade stance, brushing her arm closer to Bruce to erode more of his personal space if he'll let her. He doesn't move away, instead mirrors her head tilt toward her.

Tony dons hauture and informs Steve, "I'm comfortable enough in my sexuality to be Bruce's fairy god _mother_."

"Hold on," she clarifies, "is this chest-bumping over who's less homophobic?"

"You know what would settle it?" Bruce jostles his crossed arms to nudge against her like a cat marking scent. "Turkish oil wrestling."

She concedes the point, lips pressed to hold close a smile as much from his stance as his quip.

~*~

He shows up after the next class too, because she’s worked in his background, and it looks so normal, two people who work out in the morning. Of course Kate would have a well-off boyfriend who shows up with coffees, who checks up on her but also mutely apologizes for it, which is something Bruce can project clear across a city street with a stuttering self-deprecating shrug. 

“I design technical gear,” she tells them. “Stuff that they turn into clothes for REI, places like that.”

“You should design dancewear,” says Emma, the short bubbly former chorus girl. “Lord knows one of the perks of taking class as a grownup is giving up the tights.”

She doesn’t tell them about the short proposal she’d sent off to Pepper viz., the commercial applications of Britches to the Future, just smiles and takes her leave.

“Kiss my cheek,” she says to Bruce as he hands over the tea. He does, bemused, and she bumps him with her hip as they begin their walk. His cup sloshes a little, and he absently shakes his hand off and wipes it on his thigh.

“What do you talk to them about?” 

She shrugs. “Class, old performances, life in the city.”

“Ah,” he says, "I learned Bengali in part from the neighborhood cinema, outside at night watching bootleg Bollywood projected on a sheet while people talked, got to know me. Easy connection."

She likes that she doesn’t have to explain things to him.

"So you talk shop." He’s bubbling with curiosity this morning, loose and warm from his run.

"Not exclusively." she adds, mischievous. “Today we discussed why ballerinas have such a bad reputation.” 

“I didn’t know they did.” 

“Mmm, terrible,” she sips her tea, two bags strong today, and lets her tongue dab the sugar from her lip. “They’re notorious for their blowjobs.”

“Huh.” He takes the comment at face value, as if there weren’t even any personal implications to shrug off. "Well, Robbie is clearly in it for more than good head."

"I'm touched, doc."

"You went to the trouble of assigning me a cover, I felt I should remember it."

They have breakfast together at a spot halfway to the tower, a little hit of morning togetherness and easy intimacy, the kind of detail that makes an identity go down smooth, gives you a base to improvise from if the need comes up.

What they end up improvising instead is the beginnings of the protocol, over breakfasts in little cafes and diners on their way to the tower each morning. He packs away eggs and toast, using it to fill in the pauses and hesitations as he talks about triggers and boundaries in a circumspect voice pitched to carry across the table and no farther. 

~*~

He works on cheap clean water technology, stabilizers for vaccine transport that negate the need for an uninterrupted cold chain, weapon and defense systems for a dirty half-dozen fighters whose quirks are raised to some exponential power, and the most disconcerting part of his day is always breakfast.

That morning they’re talking theories and origins, spinning off from New York vs Estonia to find the emotional hinge in between that let him be a focused force on one side and a howling, dangerous child on the other.

“Anger drives it, sure. Fear, outrage...combinations are synergistic. But I can get annoyed, that’s not...risky. It’s not...there’s a shift, like an animal. Fight or flight, that’s the catalyst. That’s when I can’t control it--when you add in one more unanticipated factor.”

“So surprise is bad.” Her eyes are intense and focused, but he doesn’t feel like he’s being lead.

“Surprise is generally bad, but it’s not necessarily about the unexpected. Sometimes, it’s the build-up. Anticipation, tension, waiting for something to happen, expecting it until it stretches out into that unknown when you feel like your head is going to come off.”

He stirs his coffee, tapping the spoon against the edge, biding a little time. “Walking away is usually enough. Removing myself from the situation, reminding myself I don’t have to participate. Although, sometimes that’s just a delay--walking away isn’t satisfying, to either part. That’s when it starts to get dicey.”

He looks at her, the lush curve of her mouth, her face open and unassuming.

“Sometimes, it’s about finding a stopgap release--a quick hit of anger, like slamming a fist against a wall.”

“Circuit breaker.” She nods slightly, indicating that he should go on, but he’s nearly done for the day. 

There’s a quality in her focus that feels like she’s peeling back his skin. He doesn’t mind, he’s finding he kind of enjoys it, but it’s like getting ever more naked in public. Eventually someone’s gonna call the cops.

He’s got the coffee cup nearly to his mouth when she asks, “What about sex?”

She patiently watches him blink at her, coffee cup hovering, 

He doesn’t want to hedge, but can’t help clarifying, raising his brow, “As a provocation or a solution?”

She’s unwinding a wicked, teasing smile that he wants to match, so he sets down his cup. It’s a legitimate question, but he also gets that she’s left him some room for play, moving the conversation from interrogation to discussion. 

“Like everything,” he says thoughtfully, “it’s all about intent. Masturbation can potentially reset the clock, but there’s a risk of frustration, and that’s gasoline on the fire.”

“Frustration?”

“I’m not a kid, I can get myself off. It’s whether or not it’s going to be a satisfying experience. Sometimes scraping off the layer of lust leaves something worse.” Grief, bitterness, self-recrimination, loathing, anger.

She shrugs a shoulder, sipping from her cup, “Sometimes it just helps a person sleep.”

“Yes...well,” he acknowledges, filing that gem away for later contemplation.

“And with a partner?”

“The evidence is limited, either way. Too big a risk for idle curiosity.”

She lets that lie and signals for the check, and he thoughtfully finishes his coffee.

He has alluded to Triggers and the Things That Help to others before, fending off questions, providing just enough information, but he’s never laid the whole eclectic list out for anyone before, much less over tea and toast, sticky with his own sweat, to a brutally beautiful redhead in a tank top and shrug that doesn’t hide the warm flush on her chest. It feels halfway between describing a training program and negotiating a kink scene.

~*~

The morning that Banner fails to show up, she tells herself it’s nothing, and chooses to act like it's not a big deal.

She finally accepts the standing invite from the dancers and drinks black coffee from Starbucks as they crowd around a table to look at kid pics on Emma’s phone. She puts three Splendas in her cup because Kate has a sweet tooth, and explains that Robbie had to work late the night before. It’s possible that working late is the truth in that lie. 

When she saw Banner the day before, he’d been distracted, a bit scattered, but he’d asked her to come up to the lab the next afternoon so he could fit her with one of his hacked physiomonitors. She’d agreed.

Her phone vibrates, and she checks it at the table, because she wants to and it’s something they all do. Emergencies don’t come through the wireless network, anyway. It’s a message from Clint, a reference they use when there’s something up that needs checking out, but not necessarily a priority one. More like a priority seven or eight. He’s on kid duty for the week, and she wonders if it’s something they can discuss remotely, or if she’ll need to go out to the farm in Parma.

They don’t talk about Barton’s real life with the rest of the team. When she put her history up for global inspection, it was a step towards starting fresh. Clint started fresh a long time ago, and has managed to keep his family out of everyone’s gaze except for hers and Fury’s.

She doesn’t hurry through coffee or goodbyes, doesn’t vary her routine. She's supposed to meet Bruce at noon, but she heads back to the neighborhood Kate lives in and stops by the Mailboxes-R-Us to pick up mail from one of her newer identities, before detouring back to the tower, tying loose ends if she needs to head out to Barton's.

She's going to be late and maybe she’s trying to decide whether she should be peeved or concerned, or say nothing at all. It’s not like promises have been made. 

She’s running logistics in her head as she takes the elevator to the lab, not bothering to change clothes. The flight to ROC and renting a car for the twenty minute drive is negligible, but if she leaves the city for more than a day it’s going to be obvious to the team that it isn't Avengers business she's on--she hadn’t been establishing the habit of disappearing for days like Clint, and they were no longer in an organization where that was a given.

Being a civilian is a pain in the ass, she thinks, turning the corner into the lab to find Banner and Stark facing off over a lab bench.

The body language alone makes her head snap up to scan the room for tight corners and blunt objects, even before she hears the edge in Banner’s voice, “Dammit, Tony.” 

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, green bean,” Stark soothes, too offhandedly. “It’s just a precaution.”

“We’ve been working on precautions,” Banner says, hoarse with grim restraint. “This is more than a precaution.”

She makes a noise to alert them to her presence; JARVIS had failed to announce her. She’s flattered, but now was not the time to extend to her Barton's stealth privileges.

He glances her way and then back to Tony, who avoids both of them in favor of jerkily refiling items on a holoscreen. Banner wipes his face roughly, shaking his head and looking upward with incredulity, "You can't launch a stealth satellite full of war robot. I can't believe those are real words. I can't believe I have to say them to you."

Natasha strolls over to the other side of the screen and waits until Tony can’t help but look at her through it. She tilts her head, seeking a balance between disapproval and trying to shift the tone of the room. “And you make fun of Thor for thinking every problem is a nail.”

Banner huffs, still shaking his head as he sends his stylus across the desk with a skitter. Tony clenches against a startle but doesn’t respond. Banner looks at her, checking in or maybe tagging her in. His pupils are tight but the rims are still deep brown, and she nods, not sure what he needs but willing to give it. He turns and whips his mug into the far corner of the lab with a smash, and removes himself from the situation.

In the silence he leaves behind Natasha ditches the effort at lighthearted, letting all emotion drain from her voice. “The answer to every question is not flying robots, Tony.”

“Listen, you work on your watch, Johnny Sokko, I’ll work on my robots.”


	4. Chapter 4

Banner knocks on her open door. It's the first time he's come to her suite, and when she looks up from her overnight bag, his tentative smile is chagrin and concern. 

"I'm sorry," he says, "about missing this morning. We were up half the night. Tony is..." He trails off, rubbing the back of his neck. He looks exhausted, and there's something ashy on the outside of his smile.

His face is open though, and she knows it's for her. It's the opposite of the animation and carefully vented rage she saw earlier and she feels like an idiot. Control or no, the Hulk is always there slumbering. She cannot overlook that fact in the upwelling of whatever this is she's been dallying with. Affection, interest, something as simple as trust? She doesn't know what to call it but clearly it's stripping her of clarity.

"Doc," she gives him a nod, calm and remote. "It's nothing."

He waits in the doorway for an invitation to come in. She doesn't give it. His eyes flick to the bag.

"Business trip," she says, shrugging. “Shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

“Barton okay?”

“Just a meet-up.” she assures, letting him fill in a likely story for where she’ll be.

"I meant to meet you, like we do," he starts, "I like--"

"It's really nothing." Her emphasis is just cruel enough that she can see hurt flicker for a second on his face, and then he shuts down. She's so attuned to the wash of his expressions that the blankness feels like a slap. Shame warms her cheeks and she sets it aside; she needs to focus. Protocols, missions, whatever it is Clint has wind of. She can't get lost in damage control.

"I’ll leave you to it," he says, already turning away.

She sinks down onto the bed after he leaves, and opens her bedside drawer, checking her gun. She has to fly commercial, it will need to stay here, but she wanted the reassurance of it.

The exchange earlier was unsettling because it underscores how little she wants Stark’s goddamned Hulkbuster to be their first line of defense. In fact, she doesn't want there to be a line of defense, when there can be a method of deployment and recovery. She knows they can do better by him. She can do better.

Breaking into his room is a blatant violation, but it feels important to emphasize that they really aren’t Katya and Robbie, after all.

She wants him to know this is something she can do without him catching her, but that she’s choosing not to handle him like a mark. That she’s willing to blow apart any illusion that she’s trying to manipulate him. She finds she needs to do this damage control after all, before she can leave, and this conversation needs privacy.

She's been sitting on his bed for half an hour, and he should be here by now. He's breaking more of his own routines today. It's nearly dark and she's risking having to reschedule her flight, possibly her airport.

He tenses when he sees her, then flicks on the lights and says, "Agent Romanoff," in this flat way that digs at her.

It’s hard to look at him, hovering in his own doorway now with his hands fisted deep in his pockets, but she owes him the truth.

"I was disappointed," she says. "I don't…” She lifts her chin, anchoring her arms down straight at her sides and just says it. “I don't let people disappoint me.”

His hands pull out from his pockets and come together, palms rubbing slowly as he listens.

“I like seeing you there in the mornings, and when you weren't...I was disappointed. And then I was embarrassed."

He moves around the bed, sitting on the edge beside her. He spreads out his fingers so that they brush hers, and then he lifts his other hand toward her slowly, like he's waiting for her to shy away. She's not shy but she can feel her pulse in her throat.

He touches her cheekbone as if it were fragile and he leans in, breath warm against her other cheek. "I don't ever want to disappoint you," he says, and his voice is low, confident, intimate. It shoots straight to the core of her.

She curls her fingers against his knuckles on the bedspread. Every movement feels fraught, a chess move when she's trying so very hard not to game the interaction. If he were anyone else? If she were? But that's beside the point. They are only themselves. She moves so her mouth is millimeters from his, breath mingling.

She can feel his control singing through him. She can tell by the set of his mouth that he's not holding back from reluctance or hesitance, but holding on, watching to see just how honest she's willing to be with him. With herself.

The heat of his skin radiates across the gap he’s holding fast, too much like touch and not enough, and she just...lets go of the recursive calculations, her skills, her good judgement.

She watches her other hand rise up and fist into his hair, pulling him into a kiss that's fear and longing and the surrender of control. He makes that curious wanting sound she’d heard from him once before; she inhales sharply, reflexively, and then they are both lost.

His mouth is hot, teeth sharp, and the kiss is both more desperate and more delicate than anything she's experienced. She wants to shove him down on his back, strip them both bare. She wants to pull back, walk away. She wants, more than anything, the sweetness of his tongue, the softness of his lips, the heat of both as his own fingers tangle and tug in her hair in return.

He pulls away first, pressing his forehead to hers. She makes a noise of protest, but his fingers soothe circles on her scalp, and she catches the slowing rhythm of his breathing as they both cycle back to resting heart rates.

She licks her lips and tells him another truth, "I have to go."

And he lets her.

~*~

After she clears the airport, the road to the farm is empty and dark, and she rolls down the windows and lets the night air tear through her hair. She’s seeking clarity, but by the time she pulls up to the house she feels like the only soul on earth, unsettled in a way she doesn't normally let herself acknowledge. She attributes it to losing the plot earlier, unmoored by heady honesty and lust, and the confusion of working this without an identity to inhabit. 

Getting up, walking away? It was the right choice, on all fronts.

She needs time to game out the consequences of what happened tonight. She needs to throw as much context at him as he can take. She needs to keep focus on the mission, which is not thoughts of what his very capable hands could be doing to her right now. She throws the car into park and walks up the rutted drive to the house.

Clint greets her on the porch with Cooper slung on his hip, sacked out with his face buried deep against his dad’s neck so she wonders if the boy can even breathe. Clint holds the screen door open for her and settles her in the kitchen with a datapad. He lays a hand on the top of her head, a gesture he uses with the kids to connect or to soothe without a lot of fuss. For the first time she just lets him, but his only remark on that is to snag the bottle opener from where it hangs on the wall and toss it over his shoulder at her.

She looks at the first few lines of the API article, sees the notes Clint has scrawled in the margins of the text. Fuck--this could be a problem.

Cell service was sketchy in the house because, on top of rural, the wet plaster walls are like a Faraday cage, but when they moved back a few weeks ago she set them up with a signal booster along with a few more security mods. Before she dives into the sins of her past, she texts Banner, _I was 15 the first time I killed someone._ Then she goes to the fridge and gets a beer.

Her phone buzzes, _That's a hell of a mash note._

She takes a deep breath. The phone buzzes again, _I know better than to say be safe, so be careful._

Clint slides into the chair, opening his own beer. She turns off the phone. It's time to work.

"I hate to haul you out here, but this gives me a bad feeling," he says. "Could be bad like a toothache, could be bad like a brain tumor."

“You’re forgetting that a tooth abscess can spread to the brain.”

“You think you’re being all Russian on me, but I think you’re making my point.”

She scrolls through a list of news reports so small they’re more like epigrams. A ten year old missing from hospital after a traffic accident in which her grandmother, her sole guardian, died. A nine year old that couldn’t be located after fire razed the apartment building where she lived with a stepmother and three unrelated kids, her father having died in prison. An eight year old recently placed in foster care when her father died of cancer, now unable to be located. No remains, or any evidence of foul play or struggle.

_Weird age_ , Clint’s notes said, _not the usual type_. The girls were too old to be easily snuffed out by abuse but still a few years unripe for pimps, and their background made field labor or domestic service unlikely. Law enforcement and foster agency reports follow, depressingly cursory or frustratingly sparse. Clint hadn’t annotated this part, having survived falling through the cracks himself. Snippets of intel from mutual acquaintances in the SHIELD diaspora follow, which paint a stranger picture.

Even in the brief sketch of these reports, the girls share common traits. They did well in school, sometimes up until the very last day. They were in activities or sports, to an unusual degree for working class children--people had been scraping together to keep these kids in uniforms, tap shoes and camping gear. And in each case, by the time they went missing, there was no one left to take them in.

Natasha takes a long pull of beer to spite her queasiness. One fact she has: little Natalia’s mother leaned out of a burning building to toss her to safety.

She sets the bottle down with a click. The Red Room is history, even if someone’s been picking up the discarded toys. In all likelihood, the explanation is mundane. She draws breath to say as much but Clint shakes his head and says, “Keep looking.” 

She swipes to the photos. They’re all the same type of girl. Underneath the vagaries of bone structure and complexion, the constant is a fluid upright bearing and a sharp strength in the gaze.

Smart girls, graceful, adrift without ties. Girls sharp enough to see a rigged game had just gotten worse. At best, a decade of foster care and maybe a chance to juggle minimum wage with community college, if they kept testing well and didn’t get pregnant. These could be kids looking for more--or seeing the opportunity for it in a persuasive voice. And the truth is, even if this is a Red Room remix, she’s unsure she has the right to unmake that choice for them, no matter how pressing the feeling of responsibility is that currently bows her head over the tablet.

Then Clint taps the screen to pull up a grainy picture, a canted shot from an ATM camera. A woman walks side by side with the eight-year-old, her hand resting proprietorially on the child’s back between her shoulder blades.

Decades have passed since Natasha saw that face last. Blonde hair was now fully blanched silver, and the wrinkles at the creases of her mouth etched deeper into softer flesh. Regal and grandmotherly. Natasha hears the timbre of Madame’s voice in her head, her insistence on calm, clarity, precision...the resonance of pleasure when Natasha’s shot rang true.

“I suspected you would recognize her. Esposito pulled in a bunch of favors for me, and unofficial confirmation has that woman in all three of those locations at the time of the disappearance. This is the only photo.”

“Yob tvoyu mat’.” Natasha mutters. She finishes her beer, sitting with the unheeded impulse to turn on her phone, while Clint makes her a damned grilled cheese.

~*~

She spends the whole next day at the house, in the strange rhythm of moving between playing with the kids and diving deep into the file Esposito had put together for Barton for her. They bat ideas back and forth, sometimes over the kids’ heads the same way they talk at the tower, trying to hammer out their next step. Mostly she focuses on the kids, and lets strategy play out in the back of her mind. They’re growing so fast, and she doesn’t see them often enough. They milk their relaxed summer bedtime for all it’s worth but eventually Lila demands her tuck-in from Aunt Natasha and Clint parlays that into Cooper hitting the sack as well.

She kneels down by the bed and pulls up the light sheet so it covers Lila’s shoulder but not her ear, smoothing dark hair back off her forehead and neck. “You got my shoulder, too!”

“Don’t sound so surprised, kid, I remember important things.”

“But you haven’t started singing.”

Natasha looks over at Clint in the doorway, baffled. Just when she’d gotten halfway decent at improvising multiple stories about small animals, the girl changes the rules.

“We’ve negotiated from five stories down to singing her to sleep.”

“All the songs I know are terrible,” she says. “They’re drinking songs. And they’re Russian.”

Lila speaks through a yawn, “So are Daddy’s.”

“Terrible?”

“She means Rush.” Clint’s quiet singing voice is a blown out reed approximating a tune, “ _There’s unrest in the forest/There is trouble with the trees/For the maples want more sunlight/And the oaks ignore their pleas_ …”

“That’s because your Daddy thinks that Rush is an acceptable musical choice.”

“Don’t knock Rush. Geddy Lee is a genius.”

“How about I learn some songs,” she says, “And next time, I’ll sing you one.”

Lila pulls her face into serious consideration, then nods.

She lays a kiss on the girl’s head, scent of sunshine and playing outside, and steps into the hall. Clint’s voice is softer but just as bent off-key, “Hush little baby, don’t say a word…”

He joins her out on the porch, where she’s been listening to a raccoon try to break into the trashcan. “That is also terrible,” she says to him. “Is it to prepare them for all of the disappointments they’ll face when their parents turn out to be only human after all?”

“It’s about knowing your folks will do anything for you.”

Natalia’s mother made her way back through flames to get to a window she could smash, and sent her toddler into a blanket held out by neighbors, with no idea what she was sending that child into, just knowing she couldn’t follow. Natalia stole herself back when she broke conditioning and went rogue, when she began to thresh the bits of reality from all the implanted chaff.

Clint barks out a laugh, reeling her back. “Laura could only remember the words to I Wanna Be Sedated.”

She snorts. “That sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Puts Cooper down every time, I’ll take it.” He adds, with a shrug, “All lullabies are terrible because they make you go to sleep when you don’t want to.”

She breaks the ensuing silence, speaking partly to him and partly into the dark. “What if they’re better off? I know it seems,” she pauses, searching for the right word, “...blasphemous. But what if it’s true?”

“You’re okay with at least three more trained killers entering the world?” his voice is light, but that doesn’t negate the weight of the question.

“I think,” she taps the bottle against her bottom lip. “I think it’s not that simple. What was done to me, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone else. I wish I hadn’t done the things I did. But I don’t... It made me what I am, it’s part of me, and I like what I can do. I don’t know a way around that.”

“Maybe…” Clint pulls a rock from the turf by the steps and launches it into the dark by the trashcans, smiling when he hears the yelp and scatter, “maybe we can split the difference.”

~*~

They need more time and more explicit intel, and she’s weighing a few bad options that all boil down to risking more of her truth spread far and wide where she can’t control or define it. She’s also mulling over the concept of choice. Can it really be called choice when all your options are bad, or when the only thing on the table is a chance of survival?

Banner had texted her once more that morning: _Protocol_ with a smiley bullseye face that was maybe supposed to be Steve’s shield. She’s not sure; she’s not much for Emojis. She did ask Clint if he knew what a mash note was and he flipped a pancake onto her plate.

“Like a love letter, but steamy.”

“Yeah, I’m apparently bad at them.”

“I told you. Super Cockblocking Serum strikes again. You’ve got to stop trying to set Rogers up. You clearly have no clue what his type is.”

She suspects his type may be, if only in part, James Barnes--and that’s a tangle she’d be okay with never having to unravel.

“Where are you fishing from now, anyway? The ballet class?”

She shakes her head, mouth full of pancake.

From the airport she makes her way straight to the tower because she’s too late for class, but she misses it. She wants to sweat, needs to lose herself in someone else’s choreographed motion, hew to someone’s else’s vision in a safe place, even for just ninety minutes.

She wants to find Banner, hash out some of her antsiness against his measured, practiced calm. She rejects the idea. It’s too tempting, and she can’t give in to impulse. 

When she walks into the gym she sees Steve in a defense-ready posture, facing off against Banner, and she stops short. She was gone less than 48 hours, someone should have told her--and then she notices the ease in Steve’s knees, the lack of conviction in his stance. He’s alert, but not at full fighting strength.

“Cap,” Banner says, ”You agreed to do this. Hit me.”

“It just feels wrong to take a poke at you like this.” Steve shakes his head, fists opening to gesture at Banner’s open and waiting stance. “And if we’re wrong, you’ll destroy this whole building. This was a bad idea.”

She knows it’s not, but Steve wasn’t there for a lot of the hashing out. She’s actually surprised Steve proceeded this far without her; maybe Stark riled him up this morning. She’s unsurprised at Banner’s participation. He’s learned to be deadly serious about risk management, but some people get a hypothesis in their teeth like a mastiff bringing down a bull.

The theory is solid with the evidence: it’s not so much the trigger as it is the intent. If he’s in control. That’s the big if, and one they need to confirm or the rest is just pissing into the wind, but she needs the focus of working on a goal, has been itching for something big and terrifying to run up against, and it looks like she’s not the only one trying to channel some antsiness.

“I’ll do it.”

Bruce sees her, and his face reacts before he tamps it back to his normal bemused expression, like he’s keeping that flash of delight a secret. He nods a tacit permission to her. There’s a nervy energy to him, in his stance and his darting eyes. But he keeps his focus on her as she walks up.

She whispers, “Hi, Doc. Sorry about this,” but doesn’t give either of them time to second guess, just hauls back barroom style, telegraphing intention the way they’d planned, and lands a right hook in his face.

It knocks him back on his ass--his stance wasn’t solid and she drove up through her hip--but it doesn’t knock him out. He’s sprawled back on his elbows, knees angling up to protect the groin.

It feels exactly like the moment an acrobat loses contact with every surface. All that’s left is ballistic momentum and expectation; you either stick the landing or you’re dashed like hope.

There’s a shudder, and he forces his eyes open to scan the room, a deep breath expanding his chest impossibly. Awareness. Be present with the anger, be present in your surroundings. Her own chest is tight, and Steve’s arm hovers in the air around her waist to yank her away, but Banner’s eyes stay open, stay brown, and he’s working it like an equation instead of a seizure, one methodical respiration after another.

“Ow,” he finally says.

Her heart is jack-hammering as relief hits her.

“Huh. I’m still here.” His smile is so open, all teeth and crinkling eyes, that she grins back at him like an idiot. Warmth reverberates between them, contrary to the red bruise blooming on his jaw.

“You did it,” she says, and helps him up. He remembers to roll and flex, and this time, when he holds on to her wrist, the trace of his fingers over her pulse makes her shiver. Adrenaline: the ultimate aphrodisiac.

“Stop looking so happy,” Steve says, agitated and grumpy. “That could have gone pear-shaped in a heartbeat.”

Bruce, hardly the optimist, slaps him on the back. “But it _didn’t_.”

She thinks that Steve also took note of the fact Banner just casually touched another human being on purpose. She grabs a cold pack from a side cabinet and activates it, handing it to Banner and joining him on the bench.

Steve paces, working his own thoughts. 

“For what it’s worth,” Banner says, cricking his neck, “I’m pretty sure you only get to do that once.”

“You owed me one, from the helicarrier,” she says.

“I remember apologizing for that.”

“You said it like ‘I told you so’.” She knocks her knee against his. “It’s okay. You were right.”

He shrugs, “So were you.”

Steve stops in front of them, his upper lip in the flat line that means business. “We need a safer environment,” He spares a look of concern for Bruce, then eyes Natasha with awe only barely checked by disapproval. That look always makes her want to see how far she can shock him.

“I’ll talk to Tony,” she offers, “See if he’ll buy some land we can tear up. Hell, I’m sure SI already has testing grounds for heavy artillery.”

Banner gives her the side-eye, but he doesn’t protest.

“I need to catch up on homework,” she says to them both as she stands, then looks at Banner. “This was fun. I’ll see you later, if you still want me to run on the treadmill.”

“Some files on your desk,” Steve calls after her, “and Thor called movie night tonight.”

~*~

Bruce can’t help prodding at the tender knot she left on his jaw. There had been an instant before she connected when he could feel the Other Guy snap to attention, the way hearing your name across a busy street instantly focuses you to that point. That long moment of the two of them looking through the same eyes was singular in that neither one was fighting to take over, and for the first time he noticed there was wariness and fear threaded through the rage and that those inclusions didn’t come solely from Bruce.

He thinks about the other half of the protocol, about how you’d go about lashing down a loose cannon if it’s not just angry as all hell but also leery that yielding equals oblivion. He weighs the phrase “heavy artillery” coming from Natasha, whose hands could touch delicately, then text him murderous secrets, and now just laid him flat.

“Stop fiddling with it.” Steve sits on the bench and gestures for him to put the cold pack back on. “My mom used to give me half a potato to hold against it when I’d come home like that. We didn’t have beefsteak just lying around for black eyes.”

Bruce has a response to that, but he takes a very long moment before he voices it. “My mom used makeup. Never really worked.”

Steve gives a similar pause before he nods, acknowledging. “Yeah, where I grew up, the walls were thin. Things were hard for my mom and I, but...I knew how they could have been a lot worse.”

Bruce sighs. “Yeah.”

The silence is weirdly comfortable. Then it turns just weird when Steve offers, “You know, I actually know how to cover a mouse like that with make-up, if you want.”


	5. Chapter 5

Natasha fiddles with the clip that’s supposed to grip her nostrils closed. There’s a mouthpiece as well, but she’s saving those for last. She’s been scanned to calculate her surface area, of all things, “To index the cardiac output formula,” and is now standing stripped to her sport bra and leggings as Banner places cardiac scanning nodes with a deft focus. He hasn’t gloved up but he has donned a labcoat, perhaps to have pockets to keep supplies, perhaps to shore up the boundary.

His fingertips scout the anatomy down her sternum until he finds the proper rib notch, then he lightly scrubs the spot with damp gauze. He peels the backing and presses the node on, circling the edge like pressing down a cup lid so the bubble of gel can conduct. He moves towards her heart, and he hesitates.

“Go ahead,” she says, voice low, and tugs the cup down to modest cleavage to give him better access.

He clears his throat, “Actually,” and indicates the undercurve of her breast.

She lifts the band, cupping herself upward and looking down at his bent head. He traces along one of her ribs to a spot near her arm, preps the skin, and presses the node flat. He straightens, and finds the hollow at the right side of her throat, placing the third node for the last axis of scanning. His bruise is ruddy purple, and his other cheek is flushed. For a moment when he’s done he rests fingertips against the side of her neck, feeling the heartbeat that’s flexing in three dimensions unheeded on his datapad. This time she remains still, waiting to see what he will do with it.

What he does is lead her to the couch and ask her to lie down relaxed for ten minutes. He takes the chair, and turns his focus to the datapad. His voice is a half-distracted murmur. “This will help me set the physiometer to record cardiopulmonary data, to find out how efficient you are, physiologically.”

“I understand the concept, Doc,” she says, “I just thought there’d be more running.”

“Later. I need to get you to baseline, first. Then you run. Then you’re right back here, so I can get a recovery curve.”

“This might not work.” There’s nothing to distract her but the distractions she’s been setting aside for days now. “Kinda keyed up from earlier still.”

“I can’t help that. Well.” He pauses, and while she can’t see him from her vantage point she can almost feel the crawl of expressions moving across his brow. “Not without introducing confounding factors.”

He’s a walking bundle of confounding factors.

“Once I calibrate it, you could wear it anywhere, it will give a good overall picture of your metabolism and how it was affected.”

Natasha places the nose clip and mouthpiece, settling into the cushions, and turns her focus inward on the Esposito file.

She really can’t find a way through this that doesn’t risk knowledge of her enhancement getting out. Even if she does nothing, if she lets this program ride out to whatever conclusion, Madame is out there like a shoe waiting to drop. In fact, Madame being in the US is a very bad sign to begin with. So it comes down to whether she wants to bring this to the attention of the tattered remnants of SHIELD.

She respects Maria, but she also knows Hill is dealing with a broken pinata full of leaky batteries and screws trying to sift through the agendas of every faction of SHIELD that walked away from the Triskelion. Natasha trusts Maria, but not Hill, not with this right now.

“Time to run.”

Banner starts the treadmill at a walk, then speeds it up to a run, then starts steepening the incline at intervals until she’s running up a hill open throttle.

This is nothing the team has talked about, and she’s reluctant to bring it to the table, bring them to bear on it. She needs resources, though, just to find out what the situation is on the ground, and if it has deep roots she may need the full suite of Avenger skillsets.

Maybe even Banner’s, since he’s now one of four people aside from Madame who know the enhancement piece of the Red Room history.

She runs harder, shifting her ribs out with each breath to take in more air, and doing it faster. He’s already maxed out the intensity, so she just needs to occupy this level of exertion until he gets what he needs. She needs him to have as much data and context as possible, just in case.

She also needs Stark on-board, even if she can only get him as a financier. She maps out her groundwork for that piece, just letting her body channel energy and motion like a conduit.

Banner motions her off the treadmill and back to the couch, no cool-down, just her gasping like a landed fish for a few minutes until she rides the recovery curve back down.

She feels pretty baseline by now, and a moment later he leans over and releases the nose clip, offering an SI mug for her to spit the mouthpiece into, then handing her water and tissues.

He looks between her and the datapad on his thigh, browbone propped in his hand. “I did not expect this.”

“Disappointed, Doc?”

He peels off his glasses, dangling caught by one finger as he rubs at his forehead and eye sockets. “It’s like seeing a magic trick explained...only to be even more amazed by the sleight of hand involved.”

~*~

Maybe it’s because she’s so deliberately _not_ working on Banner that she turns her attention to Stark. Establish a rapport, distract the analytical mind, offer the subconscious indirect suggestions. 

She invites Pepper to Thor’s movie night, cognizant that the easiest way to capture Tony’s interest was to take some of Pepper’s focus away from him.

“Let me get this straight.” Pepper projects her voice over the rattle of Steve making popcorn in a pot on the stove, “You made him watch a _musical_ with _Nazis_ \--”

Steve stops shaking the pot for a moment, “To be fair, I was actually _in_ a musical with Nazis…”

“--I just--I...okay, I hadn’t thought about that. It still seems problematic.”

“We can’t avoid problematic with this crowd, Pep.” Tony places a kiss on her shoulder as he passes, a gesture toward territoriality that Pepper receives like a liege accepting tribute, “Last week it was _The Blues Brothers_ , which, I’d forgotten had Illinois Nazis in it, but Clint was laughing so hard at all the trashed cop cars we didn’t realize Thor was weeping into his mead.”

“Oh my God, why?”

In a rare moment of emotional care, Tony looks to Steve before saying anything--Steve had also been into the mead that night and caught the beer tears from Thor--so Natasha explains, “Fraternal love.”

Pepper’s “Oh,” sounds heartbroken and queasy. Then she straightens and shakes her head, “Well, as far as musicals with Nazis go, I guess it was still better than _Rocky Horror_.”

~*~

Natasha lays out the Esposito file for Stark, including generations of unproven rumors that the Red Room was built on Zola’s research. She frames it in terms of the whole AIM fiasco, aware that even Extremis had echoes in the troubled legacy of Howard Stark in one way or another. She baits the hook as best she can.

She rolls the dice on what he makes of her connection, the real possibility that she may be enhanced--there is no option in front of her without that risk, and Stark might just file that down the memory hole like he did with what happened to Potts. 

She gives him time to process before tackling the next step, which is persuading him to think of the Hulk as a heavy artillery unit. Load, target discrimination, allowing for recoil...returning home.

~*~

Banner was reluctant to even try on the pants. Wearing them into the field felt like an acknowledgement that he planned to shit the bed out there. But the SI team had seemingly taken into account not just the expansion that defined the Britches to the Future project, but that these pants would be worn primarily--hopefully--by a medium sized guy. They came in a variety of colors, and looked like streamlined track pants with a weird weave and subtle racing stripes down the side.

“Think of it like a prophylactic.”

Banner gives a slow blink before responding. “Thanks, Cap.”

~*~

“I feel like I’m walking around in a condom.”

Maybe he’s a little loud, playing it to deflect his discomfort. The old guy with the slept-in eyebrows who eats half a bottle of ketchup on his hashbrowns every morning gives him the stink-eye. 

“Which I guess is better than doing the walk of shame bareback.” He stabs at his eggs.

“Cap’s got a way with words,” she agrees, stealing a triangle of his toast, “but the pants look good. Flexible, form fitting--on the street you just look like you’ve stepped up your training game.”

“I feel like an asshole. Everyone can see my…” he flaps his hand down towards his lap. “Also, I’d buy you toast.”

“It tastes better when I steal it. Doc, you’ve gotta get comfortable in the uniform. You think I put that jumpsuit on the first time and thought, damn, I’m hot and I’m gonna kick some ass?”

He challenges, “Yes.”

She laughs. “Yes?”

“How could you not? I think you put on that tight layer of flexible armor, saw yourself in the mirror and drew the obvious conclusion.”

“Ok, maybe that’s true. But it’s…” she pauses, looking for a way to explain without sounding like she’s lecturing, or being condescending. “It shows that you’re one of us. We all suit up. It’s like a performance.”

He hands over his last triangle of toast.

“Steve, he inhabits the idea of Captain America, he leaves the time travel and the ones he’s lost behind when he pulls on that cap. Tony in the suit is more than a big mouth, a bank account and a brain that won’t shut down. Clint and I...it’s the Job, our uniform is part of our equipment, it’s stepping into the physical mindset of that responsibility, and advertising that to the world.”

“And Thor?”

“The cape really speaks for itself.”

“So you’re saying I have to put on my tights one leg at a time, like all the other superheroes?”

“Something like that.” She grins at him, and he smiles back, and she wonders if this is how normal people feel all the time. But she’s willing to risk belaboring this point to make sure it sinks home. “It helps, having the uniform, a way of marking what you’ve taken on. But it’s also something you can take off at the end of the day. Then you get to be the guy who pairs bespoke jeans with button-downs that are older than god.”

He looks at her, and she suspects he’s placing another piece into the context she’s been building for him.

“I put on the clothes of an identity to infiltrate. I put on ballet slippers, and I’m an adult ballerina taking class out of nostalgia and what it does for my ass. When I put on my suit, I’m...something else. More than I was before.”

“Natasha,” he reaches over, tugs at her sleeve so his fingertips slide beneath the fabric to stroke around her wrist bone.

For every positive interaction they have she then texts him a secret, lobbing a telegram of past horror toward him in 200 characters or less. Yesterday was, _Of the 27 girls who trained with me, I murdered 9. I was proud to move on to the next stage_. The intimacy of that confession is nothing compared to this, him reaching out to touch her, tentative but open, even with that knowledge.

“You’re…”

She interrupts him, turning her hand over so that their palms rest together. He strokes the thin skin along the inside of her wrist. She feels prickles of heat, her skin coming alive with a hunger for more touch, her belly tight with want. She thinks it’s why it’s easier to text, to keep that quarantined from the possibility of this.

She can see him set aside whatever he was going to say about her, and take a different tack, “And if I need some help taking them off?”

“When you get home?” She’s not even sure anymore if she’s prompting him to think of the tower as a safe space, or if she just wants to know if he sees himself as having a home.

His grip tightens, and she bites her lip. “Yeah, when I get home.”

Her voice is low, pitched for his ears, and it’s everything she’s got not to slit her eyes and purr like a cat. To keep letting him see her, instead of dressing it up as something else. “Maybe I can give you some data on that, too.”

“We should work on that, then.”

She finds the thread that she needs to follow. “It’s time, Doc. We need a baseline.”

He plucks at the fabric on his thigh, contemplative. “It is the least worst choice.”

Afterward she texts him, _When they gave me enhanced immunity, they also took my ability to carry a child. I’ve only bothered with safe sex when it was in character._

~*~

“Easy. Franklin Proving Ground. Decommissioned, which makes it better suited, actually. But we’re nowhere near testing.”

“Yeah. I know.” Bruce tucks his chin down for a moment, then looks up from under his brows, his deferential posture marred by constrained tension around the mouth. “I need a workshop to build a watch.”

The muscle of Tony’s jaw flexes, then he shakes it off with a facial twitch. “Fair enough.”

~*~

The change itself was easy. It was like any addiction to an altered state; you never stopped wanting the fix even when you stopped the practice. The rage was always there waiting to be summoned, a deep pool of cornered animal helplessness from childhood, fear and anger from Ross and his manipulations, the loss and horrors he’d borne witness to all over the world, disgust at his own hubris which had put him in this situation to begin with.

You find the right combo on any given moment, and bam. Id meets Ego with a giant green fist.

“It feels _good_ ,” his own secret, shared finally as they’d lingered past the breakfast rush, reluctant to go back into the drizzle outside that day. It’s what he’s most ashamed of afterward, trying to etch the horrifying aftermath into his brain but knowing it won’t help. Giving in to the achy itch of the rage, letting it pour up and out, feels so fucking satisfying. 

Being told you could sip from that cup, that it was okay, even when you knew that was a lie? It’s a heady, sickening feeling. 

They’d all been subdued on the ride save for Barton, kicked back and whistling to himself, a bunch of dressed up actors on the way to rehearsal. Steve had his responsible game face on, and gave Bruce a nod that was likely supposed to inspire confidence, but there wasn’t anything in there to inspire except a weary dread. No one, Bruce included, knew what this test was ultimately going to prove.

Roles reversed, he stands by the open back door of the Sprinter van peeling off his t-shirt in the humidity as Natasha places the disposable field sensors, fingers deft and professional as she dabs cyanoacrylate on his skin to hopefully adhere them. She checks his pulse against the small data recorder on her wrist and the one they’ll leave in the van. She taps the datapad, and his heart beats steadily on the read out. She nods.

“It’s up and running. We’ll be able to record your vitals as you change, possibly during and after if the superglue holds. If not, the sensors in the pants should record at least something.”

It’s his own protocol, he’d sewn the sensors into the waistband himself, but right now standing barefoot in the scrubby grass with his t-shirt balled in his hand it feels ridiculous to get a readout, since when he’s changing, he can feel his heart lurching against his ribs like it’s beating free out of a cage. Still, data is useful. Don’t knock the placebo effect, Banner, sometimes it’s all you have. These gestures toward a controlled environment, the illusion of a scientific process, they help him focus.

“Ready?”

There are no mixed messages here, no layered meanings of inquiry. This is a job and they both know it, but when he pulls out his phone to leave it behind, there’s a message, _I became a mercenary so I could choose who I killed._

They leave him to the mosquitos in the middle of the field, and he uses that last vision, a girl turned into a killer, to take him over the edge.

~*~

Barton’s RICEing his knee, Steve is filthy, and neither Tony nor Thor are anywhere to be seen. Bruce assumes Natasha is driving because the van is moving at a clip just shy of terrifying.

Clint catches his eye. “It’s either let her drive and accept that speed limits are trite suggestions, or let the guy who never got his driver’s license take a turn behind the wheel.”

“I drove all the time in Europe.”

“You ride a motorcycle now. Take the damned test.”

“It’s my prerogative as a New Yorker…”

Banner shakes his head, trying to clear it. He remembers the two of them slinging his arms over their shoulders as he stumbled toward the van. He doesn’t remember coming down. He has the familiar ache and shaky exhaustion of soured adrenaline, but feels displaced by the lack of loathing. His rolled up t-shirt hits him in the chest and he lets the blanket drop to pull it on.

“The good news is that you made a whole bunch of holes in the ground when you found a spot with unexploded ordinance,” Barton says. “The bad news is that you broke a transformer and a bunch of trees. And you really seem to have a hate-on for tanks.”

He waits.

“You stood down,” Steve confirms. “Eventually, you stood down.” 

He probes at his memory like an injury. He has a muddy image of facing off against Natasha, of her smeared in grass with blood on her face, the others heard and smelt in the periphery, sharp wariness and ozone but no advancing threat. It was the red of her hair that caught his attention and her open stance that piqued his curiosity. He remembers going quiet to hear the calm empathy in her voice as she reached out her hand.

Steve’s voice is kinder, like he’s finally able to let some of the relief shine through. “It’s a place to start. A good place.” He leans his head back against the wall of the van as they turn onto a smoother road. “And tonight, I want to scrub all this nature off me, get a good meal, and I want to watch something that DOES NOT involve Nazis.”

~*~

In the end, the swampy humidity was a boon because nothing in that wet green forest was going to catch fire no matter how many UXO he detonated with a stomp of his foot. This was sorely tested when he got to the power lines and a transformer blew like a roman candle in his fist.

Natasha pulls herself from the tangle of loamy tree roots she’d been knocked back into by the detonation. “I’m calling it,” she declares over comms, interference hum from the wild electricity pouring into the earth from the chaos he leaves behind, sauntering away from the substation and back toward the trees. “Fall back.”

_Clint had asked her, sitting on his desk where he’d pulled it right up against the window, “Besides me, have you ever talked anyone else down off a bad trip?”_

_“Just myself.”_

She moves through the underbrush like one expecting bear, slow and loud, giving him every chance to avoid interaction or make a threat display to tell her to back off. There's a shift to his shoulders and she can tell his attention is on her. The node she glued to Bruce's back blinks blue at her from an expanse of green skin--verdjazzled--and the anxiety roils into a hilarity she just barely keeps a lid on. 

He pivots to face her. He's gone to a low rumble, and the rictus that bared his teeth has eased, leaving him sullen.

"Hey...it’s me."

He settles into a crouch, legs poised to launch himself at the trees again, but leaning some weight onto the arm near her.

He's listening to her.

Something stills inside her, she can work with this.

"So...was this good?"

Between his eyebrows are furrows like a rumpled blanket. The look on his face is that of a mark just about to make you, the wrong one of your names on the tip of their tongue.

"I think this was good." She sits back in a similar crouch, primate body language but still working on her own brain as well. "I think we should do this again. What do you think?"

In the noncommittal grunt is an echo of Bruce's amused huff.

She pulls off a glove and reaches out, lazily, as if offering her arm to help him up off the floor.

Curiosity now. A massive arm crosses the distance between them, hand furled except for the index finger. She wills herself still as it moves to her hand, delicate like wanting to stroke caterpillar fuzz. His fingerprint is pebbled on her palm, the human grain writ large and tough like ray skin.

~*~

“Once it burns off, and I stop feeling like I’m on the tail end a seven-day bender? There’s a second surge, an endorphin high from not dying. It’s short lived. Usually, if I’m looking around at whatever I’ve destroyed, I just want to run, to punch something, to hurt...something. Not in a Hulk way, just… but that line is too slippery. So I find something else.”

“The adrenaline afterwards has to have somewhere to go,” she agrees. “We’ve all had to figure out where to put it.”

“And you?”

“Depending on the situation? Fighting, fucking or food. Vodka, sometimes, but it doesn’t always do much. It’s weird to have other people around, coasting on that same second wave. It mellows it out.”

Clint nods over his burrito, and even Steve raises an eyebrow. “We either drank or danced,” he said. “I used to jitter, when I had the wind. Got pretty good at it after my lungs got better and drinking was off the table.” The delight that steals over Clint’s face is so pure that she kicks him under the table.

“I will give you a million dollars to teach Nat how to jitterbug, Cap. A million, billion dollars.”

“You don’t have a million dollars,” she says, but she’s game.

“Okay, how about my nachos?”

Steve pulls the nachos to his side of the table, wipes his hands with a paper napkin, and stands up, holding his hand out to Natasha. 

“Let’s do this,” she says, taking his hand but winking at Bruce. 

Her cheekbone was uglier before, when the cut was still open, the bruise blooming and beginning to fade over the course of dinner, but he still wonders about the stiffness she appeared to shake off in the parking lot. He knows her enough now that dancing does not preclude injury and pain.

Clint slides his nachos back and continues eating for a while before asking, “Get any good data?”

“I won’t know until I can analyze it, but I’m fried right now.”

“I meant from Natasha.” Clint stuffs a loaded chip in his mouth but maintains the thousand yard stare. “She brought you in on it.”

Bruce can’t stop his eyes from finding her. Steve has progressed to the death-defying moves because she’s a quick study, of course she is, and she’s tied her flimsy hoodie around her hips to emphasize the rotation when he spins her out like a yo-yo. She’d said that Clint knew, but Bruce still doesn’t want to talk about it without her, so he tries to deflect. “Is this the shovel talk?”

“She’s given me two concussions since I met her. You uprooted a tree I was in this afternoon. If anyone needs the shovel talk on their behalf it’s Clint Barton.”

~*~

Thor flexes his labrador puppy charisma at the assembled group, giving them a smile that has two out of the three grinning back like idiots, and Stark can tell the third guy is ready to break.

“So, we’re set,” he says, more a declaration than a question. “My people will come in, work with the power company, get those suburban upstarts’ lights back on and we won’t talk about why a substation connected to a decommissioned proving ground was hot and powering a small bedroom community in East Bumfuck.”

These aren’t lies, exactly. That part of the proving ground should have been shut down from the grid when the airfield was demilitarized decades ago, not humming away pouring electrons through a financial loophole. However, he’d rather no one question how they blew the whole substation. Government officials, he’d learned the hard way, frowned on risking property, life and limb on potentially dangerous experiments. No fucking vision.

Thor always helped to pave the way in situations like this. People just couldn’t believe he’d participate in anything duplicitous. He’d be terrible at good cop/bad cop, because his presence seemed to preclude there even being a bad cop. Fortunately, the man had absolutely no head for commercial real estate law or eminent domain.

The city commissioner gave a brief, worried nod of agreement. “We appreciate the assistance, Mr. Stark, and we’ll look into the matter.”

~*~

“Stark,” Thor says, thunking an elaborate person-sized stein on the bar. 

Tony has no idea where the damned thing came from, as they’re in a place he chose for the cheeseburgers and local brewing, and it’s not like Thor carries a manbag. “Haven’t we had enough bonding?”

“Is your suit charged up yet, or do you still need someone to arrange for your transport home? It was ill-conceived to use so much power earlier zooming back and forth.”

Thor rolled the word around in his mouth a few times, “zoom, zoom,” clearly deciding he liked it.

Stark gives the bar top a pained grin. “I guess we’re still bonding.” 

Thor cradles the stein between his hands and lets out a big sigh, taking the room down a notch. “Banner is your colleague, your friend.”

“Yes,” Stark’s chest is tight, the pressure of the reactor housing a phantom pain behind the sternum repair. Friends have never come easy; colleagues either for that matter. Collaboration had always seemed ridiculous before, why increase your friction and drag when you want to get somewhere? And now it was this unexpected joy, fragile because of the risks inherent with Bruce--flight or fight--and tempered by the weight of responsibility he was still floundering under. 

“You have no faith in him?”

When you know so much is out there, so many ways it can all come crashing down around your ears, how do you keep the people you love safe? How can you live with breathtaking risk without doing everything possible to mitigate what you can’t eliminate? How do you make sense of any of this when you’re spending a small fortune trying to match a minor god drink for drink? “You loved your brother.”

Thor ruefully lifts his stein, “I still do.”

“But you kept tabs on him. It’s not about faith.”

But maybe it was.

“Also, I’m bad at faith. I prefer my eyes open.”

The proprietor herself is now behind the plank, bringing a big smile and a growler of something nearly black called Beernormous that she empties into Thor’s stein. Maybe his next project should be finding a way to dial down the wattage so they could take him out in public.

“Neither my love for my brother, nor my fidelity toward him could be placed above the safety of my people, or your people. And while it wounded my heart to make that choice and be proven right, I do understand. Love, with caution.”

“Exactly. Friendship doesn’t mean jack when you’re looking at a destructive force.”

“Banner is no Loki. His intent is good.”

“Intention doesn’t always mean anything,” Stark says, wry, more self-aware than he’s usually comfortable being. That’s one of the many fine things Pepper brings to the relationship, an acute sense of who he is, at the core, and the ability to remind him of that without devastating either of them. He continues, rolling his own pint glass around in the wet circle.

“Maybe we help Banner become more of an asset, less of a threat to himself. I want that. He wants that. It’s a possibility. He’d be, is, might be a hell of an asset. Heavy artillery,” he says, biting out a little laugh as he pulls the phrase from Romanoff’s web of carefully chosen words. “But if we can’t, we need to be prepared. The last thing we need is more surprises.”

Surprises like yet another of his team being more than human, having her own agenda that she was carefully, but thoroughly, presenting to him. As if she weren’t fucking terrifying enough. As if one of her wasn’t enough and now someone was probably raising a crop of them in his own backyard like inscrutable cold-blooded heritage killer tomatoes. “I need to be prepared.”

“That is not a good way to build trust.”

“He doesn’t trust himself, either.” That’s only partially true. Tony suspects that Bruce looks on his own involvement in Veronica as that of a throttle, keeping the project viable as a last resort out of a sense of guilt, but also regulating Tony's manic enthusiasm to build. In return Tony pushes the advantage of their shared burning inquisitiveness, the unmatched resources at his disposal. “He’s helping me build the defense system.”

“This does not mean he’s immune to your lack of faith, even if he shares it.” Thor grows a little misty again, but Tony isn’t prepared to feel bad.

“I can live with that.” He drains his glass as he checks the notification ping on his phone. “Pepper’s outside in the car.”


	6. Chapter 6

Back in the van as the sun went down, Bruce fell asleep despite Natasha’s proclivity for changing lanes like playing high-speed 3-d chess. It’s late by the time they get back, but he’s wide awake now, if still fried. At the elevator bank she graces Steve and Clint with a buss on the cheek, and then places one on his as she presses the field recorder into his hand.

“Thanks for the dance, the nachos, and the shiner, boys,” she says, saucy and spry. He knows she signed on for it--that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel bad, but it keeps him from beating himself up for it.

She doesn’t do obligation. She bends herself toward the good, working with the tools she has, choosing her own risks, and the trade they seem to have made is that he has to accept that one of those risks is him. Reciprocity and care, a strange connection that makes a kind of sense after all.

Knocking around the lab hours later he watches his raw data unfold, not in the frame of mind to analyze it yet as he has hers but just watching the two visual patterns playing out side by side and enjoying the quiet of the fulcrum between night and morning. He sleeps better these days, but there’s something normalizing about the dim illumination from the monitors and desk lamp, music coming softly from the tinny monitor speakers instead of the wrap-around sound system. It’s a nostalgia he didn’t even know he had, not so much for the time before, but for farther back in his student days.

He hears her footsteps, knows it’s her by the deliberate tread, so careful to let him know she’s on her way.

He doesn’t look up until she’s standing next to him because he likes to wait until the very last second to look up at her, getting the full force of her close up, hot and fast like a punch. Delirious. 

Her face is clean, the bruise heading towards memory. She’s carrying a heavy glass bottle glazed with ice, wearing a pale tank top, and soft pants that look like something she’d wake up in. He’d guess they were pajamas if he didn’t suspect she slept in little more than that glorious red hair. Well, maybe not here. She’s more practical than that. It’s so much softer than anything he associates with her, even the ballet clothes have a clean severity that he finds comforting.

He smiles at her, taking the disguise for what it is: nonverbal communication, a tangible expression of what she’s looking for from herself in this moment. 

“Can’t sleep,” she says. It’s not a question. And it’s not really information. She sets the vodka on his bench along with two shot glasses. 

He clears his throat. Wherever this is going, he needs to be at the top of his game. And he’s far from it. But sometimes the decisions you make in the middle of the night change your life whether you bring your A-game or not. “You need some warm milk?”

“I hate milk.”

“Melatonin? Sominex? Bar brawl?”

“I don’t want to fight,” she says softly.

“Late night snack?”

“Not hungry.”

She opens and pours generously. Hands him the shot. She clinks her own against it like synchronizing watches, and he downs it along with her. 

She doesn’t wince, and he tries very hard not to. The desperate cold assuages the sting of the alcohol but not the burn, and he can’t believe something that cold can heat him so rapidly. He feels like he’s on fire. She pours for them both again, shadowed in front of him because the desk light is dimmed and tilted down to illuminate the keyboard, but they can both see well enough to feel their way through. He picks up the glass and tosses it back along with her.

The vodka isn’t going to do much more to her than thin her blood temporarily, but he can feel a ritual playing out here on the fly. Russian. Pragmatist. Spy. Natasha. Figuring out where those things intersect, overlap, diverge. It’s been hours since he ate, though, and the alcohol is making him feel loose, reckless.

She sets her glass down. “How about you look at my back, Doc?”

He can’t close his eyes these days without seeing his hands on her body, remembering the taste of the quirk of her mouth. He knows the feel of her muscle and bone, he carries her secrets with him.

He sets down the glass and she turns around, shucking her thin tank and holding it in her hand. He knows his fingers are cold, from the late hour and the sub zero vodka, but he‘s fairly sure she’s not shivering merely from the heat transfer as he traces the pattern of bruising and abrasion across the spread of her trapezius, the inward nip of her latissimus, dragging his thumb up the dynamic curve of erector spinae. He feels the goosebumps break over her soft skin and a gasp catches in her throat.

“I need a closer look,” he says, pulling a lab stool over so he can sit a bit lower than standing, bracketing her with his knees. He forgets, sometimes, how short she is. He angles the light from the side, chiaroscuro contrast on technicolor bruising.

“Would you believe,” she says softly, head bowed forward, ”that until I joined SHIELD, I very rarely got hurt? At least not enough to notice.”

“I believe the second part, yes.” He gently prods at the spot on her back that made her suck in her breath, noticeably swollen and hotter than the rest. She sets her shirt on the bench and fishes in her pants pocket for a small pot of salve, underhanding it so the delicate curl of her wrist is framed by the swell of her hips.

“It’s a mix of bootleg tiger balm and arnica,” she explains.

He uncaps it, and the smell is half locker room, half grassy field. She always smells like something spicy and complicated, a perfume that he suspects is in the same class as his damned bespoke jeans, but he can recognize now that the scent of this balm has often been threaded through it.

He makes sure his hands are warm, and rubs the salve into the worst of the bruising. He screws the cap back on and tugs her back towards him.

“Come here,” he says softly, moving her hair off her neck and lowering his mouth to her skin. His arms cross over her stomach, and while he notes the color of her nipples, he refrains from pressing up to brush the naked weight of her breasts. 

She cups his kneecaps and strokes up his thigh, but as he simply holds her she falters, and finally lets her hands come to rest atop his arms. He breathes her in, holding the moment and feeling her loosen against him by degrees. He lingers as long as he can stand it, presses a kiss to the flutter of her carotid, and then pulls back. 

“Put your shirt back on,” he whispers. It shouldn’t be as lovely as watching her strip it off, but it is.

She turns to face him, still framed by his thighs, and for a long moment her expression is not simply unguarded but unheeded, soft and exposed. He lays a hand on her hip, tethering her close as he watches her put herself back together; as she lets him watch.

She pockets the balm. Pours a final shot of vodka for them both. Ritual comfort. She straightens the collar of his shirt, sliding her thumbs up along his jaw.

“I think I need your help,” she says, taking the bottle and stepping back out of the light. “But I’m not going to ask tonight.”

“Goodnight, Natasha,” he says.

~*~

He’d gone into the lab in the first place to deal with the unmoored feeling of letting himself off the chain and yet not fucking up. A hundred grand for a transformer was like a couple bucks in the tip jar compared to his capacity for destruction. No one died. A few cuts and bruises, and Steve the city boy bitching about mosquito bites. Afterward he had a night out with friends and went back home, it was surreal. He dove the data almost to remind himself of the terrifying risk.

Ritual comfort. Then she came around and he gave her what he had, and now he’s buzzed and horny and nothing down the list of Things That Help sounds fitting.

Maybe he should run. See if the change had any effect on his conditioning like the way it regrew that lost toenail wholesale.

It’s after five, maybe Steve is up.

Steve is coming in from his own run, his _I <3 Nueva York_ t-shirt slightly damp at the pits and spine, so a light 10k today, enough to take the edge off but he's willing to put a couple more miles on Bruce. In retrospect, running with a buzz on was nothing more than a ticket to puking. Hypothesis discarded.

He finally crashes into a real sleep late that morning, still waiting for the next installment of the Gashlycrumb Tinies she customarily texts after each assignation.

N is for Natalia, who kNocked off half her Nursery.

He wakes for dinner, but there are still no messages.

~*~

Natasha doesn't expect Bruce waiting when she gets out of class, so she makes her way to the Tower by the straightest route. She turns a corner and slows. The cant of the shoulders under the jacket of a charcoal three piece suit, the angle of the legs, one arrhythmically twitching foot propped on the other knee as he reads from the phone held loosely in his hand, the sharp flick of the thumb as it scrolls. Nothing an electrostatic veil could begin to fake.

He's grown out his beard and his hair, a brindled nimbus around dark sunglasses.

She takes a seat at the cafe table, sees her place already set with a glass of tea. "Sir." The chain of command has been obliterated, but seeing him die cemented a few things about what Nick Fury is to her, and she intends to honor them seeing as she has the chance.

He drops the phone into his vest pocket and smiles, genuine pleasure evident in the number of molars he flashes. He slides a plate over, offering "Kanafa?"

She takes a bite, honey and rosewater crumble over smooth chewy cheese. “You look like a professor.” There’s rosewater and lemon in the tea, perfuming her nose as she makes small talk by spinning out a cover for him, “Sociology. Conflict Theory. You paint on the weekends, abstracts mostly. Spouse works with veterans. Two grown daughters; one in the Army, the other a poet.”

“Funny you should mention children.” He leans his elbows on the table, fingers interlaced. “Barton showed you ASAC Esposito’s work.”

“She’s good.”

“The FBI took advantage of the fire sale on good talent when they brought Renata in. It stings to be on the losing end, but it’s nothing I haven’t done myself.” He gestures to her, case in point.

“I recall my recruitment being less straightforward than that.”

“I made Barton work for it, that’s all. Let him shoot his mouth off for someone else’s benefit for a change. Cross-training does a man good.”

She snorts, and decides she’s full up on the rosewater. She pushes the plate to the side. “I read the file. We’ve been talking tactics.”

“You say that, and yet here we are in New York. How much groundwork do you need to lay? I see the tower’s still standing, so things can’t be that bad in the frat house.”

“We’re working on a protocol for that--”

“Goddamned boondoggle--”

“Banner and I.”

Fury considers that with a tilt of his head, eyebrows up. “God knows I gave it my best shot. Man fell over seven miles to the ground and then kicked seven kinds of ass.”

“We’re taking a different approach.”

Fury toasts her with his tea glass. “And your approach on the Kudrin case?”

“I brought Stark in. Banner knows about me, but I haven’t given him the file yet.”

 

“Tasha,” He sighs, and visibly marshalls his thoughts. “I have no doubts about who you are. I wish I could have been this certain earlier--it would have given both of us a hell of a lot more solid ground to fight from--but I trust you.”

She sips the overly floral tea, betrayed by the swell of contentment.

“When we made our deal, my aim was containment and a measure of protection. The downside is that it leaves very few people in the world who can see this pattern, much less intervene. Renata is close to pinning down the location, but you need to run this op because you know Kudrin.”

His glasses have slid down, and he’s ready to meet her eyes when she looks up. “I know this is hard for you. It’s rubbing your nose in a lot of bad memories. But let’s just get our shit together and do something about it, shall we?”

~*~

The rest of her day is spent at her desk with every holoscreen up for maximum workspace. She has an appointment with Pepper at three and plans to bring Stark in at four, and she wants to be exact in what she’s asking of them both. She needs the foundation of financial backing, and the resources of their collective experience and domains.

She needs to run this as an op, separate from the Avengers if she needs to, and the handicap is that she’s going to have to recruit as she goes. Clint is a given, he’s her partner, and if someone nuked the tower this afternoon, he’d continue working this case from his kitchen table in Parma.

Thor will be useful, if not essential, for extraction and public relations. If he’s unavailable it will be easy to divert that to Steve, who’s aces with strategy and can work an audience. He just may not be as comfortable with the gray areas she’s anticipating in this particular operation. 

Finally, she needs Bruce. The reasons are a jumble of personal and professional, knotting tighter every day. The vicious personal slant to this job throws a shadow on everything that’s been happening between them. She needs him to know that whatever this is, however it started, it’s not manipulation or set up. She didn’t parcel out her secrets and her DNA in order to secure his assistance, but she’s not sure she has the ability to convince him of that. She isn’t sure she should try. 

The element of faith required is as frightening as staring him down in full Hulk. She has to trust that he can figure out where one project started, where the other lies, and know where she stands in between.

Fuck faith. She needs to show him. Seeing Fury clarified the need for action on all fronts.

She looks at her phone again, unsent messages in queue. The first reads, _“I killed a mark once right before he climaxed.”_ Another _“I’ve garroted a man with a stocking he unrolled from my thigh.”_ They all sound like a cross between a warning and bad pornography. The most brutal, _“I don’t know how many people I’ve seduced in order to betray.”_ That one is rooted in the years before she got to keep her memories. He’s always been pretty savvy that seduction, manipulation, is more than physical. More often than not, it’s a silky exploration of weaknesses, exploiting their willingness to expect less of her, to spill their own secrets thinking they’re controlling the situation.

She’s not sure when she stopped being the one steering this particular situation. Or rather, when it became undeniably a _seduction_ she’d lost control of.

Last night, there was a moment where she knew where the evening was going to go. She was unexpectedly wrong, and ended up completely undone by him.

She tries again with the text. _“The night I was sent to get you, I was tied to a chair in stocking feet and a cocktail dress, extracting information from a man distracted by whether he was going to kill me or fuck me.”_

That was not better. _“The night I was sent to get you, I was doing my job. I don’t know when you stopped being my job.”_

She shoves the phone away and goes back to the files, cross referencing potential locations from where the girls had started, the necessary accommodation to keep a minimum of three girls--and Natasha knows it’s probably more--plus any staff, because Madame is not going to waste her time or the girls’ with peeling potatoes. Facilities for training, education and enhancement are going to require a bigger footprint than a brownstone.

Location requirements are a place where neighbors aren’t going to ask too many questions, but where resources are accessible; a former school, orphanage, church or medical building. An institution with dormitory space, kitchens, steady electricity and a dependable supply chain network. She’s been looking at small cities in former industrial areas; nothing so depressed that resources are undependable, but nothing so up and coming that the local authorities and legislators are brimming with regulatory fervor.

She and Esposito are on the same track.

Three solid leads, but she needs to do recon on the ground, ask questions, see the landscape. She knows what to look for, but isn’t sure she can explain it. 

For extraction, she’ll need Bruce’s knowledge of what she is, and hence what these girls can be. He feels like an equal partner in this now, his knowledge having given her back some pieces of herself, his insight pulling buried intel out of her and then sharing it, not just in clinical analysis under her own login on his offline server, but in heady touches, tastes, and moments of understanding

She just needs to ask for his help, but the barrier to that sits heavily in her chest, as awkward as the unsent messages on her phone. Does she have the right to ask? Does she want to know what his decision would even be? Will it be more terrifying if he agrees?

~*~

There’s a small vase full of vibrant coral tulips with stems the color of melted wax crayon, that spring meadow green that Clint’s kids use to make fields in their drawings. It’s a bright spot of color on Pepper’s otherwise immaculate, sleekly modern desk.

She smiles when she notices Natasha’s gaze, gestures towards them as she indicates that they’re going to adjourn to the couch.

“From Bruce.” She adds, “Appropriate thank yous still strike an unexpected chord.” 

Natasha smirks at the remark, but acknowledges that the flowers are a perfect touch. Understated, a little hard to find at this time of year, thoughtful. A gesture without words to acknowledge a kindness. She wonders what time he finally went to bed, if he slept, or if he too tossed and turned, in a haze of want, uncertainty and giddiness.

“Did he actually send a card?”

“No, but there was one of Tony’s absurd t-shirts with it.”

She has one too, they all do. Hers is charcoal grey with a shiny red heart that stretches obscenely over her left nipple. She has elected not to wear it in the tower.

“I signed the invoice to order them, but then Tony got distracted when he distributed them around, and I ended up with a men’s X-Large. The one that accompanied the flowers was a woman’s medium.”

“The pants...” she considers how to say this, doesn’t know how much detail Pepper wants, but she’s a bright, inquisitive woman and she spearheaded the project. Also, she’s in a relationship with Tony Stark, which implies a certain flexibility of thinking combined with superhuman boundary policing, so Natasha’s unlikely to offend in any case. “They worked as promised.”

There’s a beat where they both look at each other, and Pepper breaks first, laughing in a way that encourages Natasha to join her. “I’m sorry,” she says finally, wiping the trace of mascara from under her eyes. “It’s just…”

“You never think about what they wear under the kilts?”

“Or the suits,” Pepper agrees.

So Natasha tells her about her evil designs for gold-emblazoned wrestling spankies for the team, softening her up a little bit more before laying down the six figure budget request for her investigation and op.

~*~

When he brings up the schematics for Tony’s planned defense system, there’s a moment when he thinks it would be so much easier to ditch everything; walk out of the tower like he was going for a run and disappear back into someplace that needed anonymous, amateur medical assistance. Someplace where the small amount of good he can do feels as insignificant as he wants to be.

Tony named the goddamned thing Veronica.

And then Bruce just starts to laugh because battling Tony’s weird mix of care and harassment is pointless. He vows to find someone who can insert a line of code into the programming that will make the AI refer to Stark as, “you jackass”. Maybe JARVIS can do it.

Natasha could. He swallows back that thought, vowing not to think about what she's so reluctant to ask him, forcing his attention back toward making the system more prophylactic, make a date with Ronni less of a desperate last stand.

Tony’s got a datapad in his hand, pulling up the nodes Bruce had been working on, nodding a little at what he sees, dismissing some elements. They haven’t spoken since before they all loaded up in the van the day before to head to Franklin.

Tony is looking at the numbers, giving Bruce the side eye. Okay then. The indirect approach. Months of working together, of this odd and welcome and frustrating friendship has taught Bruce to keep working, match the tone, and listen for when things shift, which they’re capable of doing in lightning quick time when Stark is worried or agitated. 

"So, you have those giant brass ones full time, then."

The current laconic approach could easily be a disguise, and at the moment, Bruce is very tired of interpreting disguises. Every correct guess feels like a victory, but the effort of interpretation is starting to wear on him. “It’s what we set out to do when we went to the proving ground.”

Tony is pacing away, and sends over his shoulder. “I meant tangling with Romanoff.”

“Well…” Weird territoriality aside, Bruce gives him points for verb choice. “Not everyone's a high-powered CEO who can snap their fingers and land a sexpot trophy partner."

Tony scrubs through a failsafe. 

"You're mean. I'm telling Pepper. She'll make Spankypants in bright purple."

Bruce slings it back into place on the holoscreen schematic. That one is non-negotiable. "I was referring to Pepper."

They work together for awhile until they hit another sticking point, and Tony tosses aside the datapad. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad things went well yesterday. Or, reasonably well.”

“Me too.”

“You get this, though, right?” Tony’s version of earnest always feels like he’s picking a fight, and Bruce wonders if that’s why he usually keeps it buried. “You and Mother Russia and Charles Atlas can create all the protocols you want, and mostly, that’s great, that’s fantastic, I’d always rather have that whole thing be your show. But you know--don’t you?--that I can’t assume it’s gonna be enough.”

“Tony, do you just sit there some days and write down all of the nicknames you can think of?”

“When I’m falling asleep; but you’re avoiding the question.”

“I don’t think there’s a defense system in the world that will make him, make me, roll over and stand down. I think you’ll have to create something that will kill him if you want to cover that base to your satisfaction--and..." Bruce thinks about the Franklin test run data, the thermal efficiency alone made no goddamned sense.

“I don’t want him dead.”

"...I honestly don’t know if that’s _possible_. Much less practical without doing a great deal of damage to everyone and anything in the vicinity.”

"Then we work on containment, trap and release. "

Bruce tries to think of a better way to convince Tony he doesn’t have to protect the world--that it won’t make up for the harm he’s done, that the people who love him have forgiven him for his sins. That all any of them can do is keep bending themselves toward the good with the hope that it can balance out.

“I want a safeguard too, one that works. But there’s a...a freedom in the idea that control is possible. That I could live within those bounds. Even after yesterday, it still seems like a fantasy, and...hard to believe in. But to stay here, I have to make the effort at giving it a shot. For the rest of you, at least.”

“Suspension of disbelief--while helping me build a defense against yourself," Tony states, as if holding two wildly disparate ideas simultaneously wasn't a lazy morning stretch for his own personality. 

"Yes."

"Against him, and the things that could come through.”

Bruce doesn't hesitate, but he pauses to catch Tony's eye before laying out the word like a promise. "Yes."

Tony breaks the tension, “Sounds complicated.”

Bruce sighs, “Yeah.”

They work for a while longer in silence.

“You should talk to your girlfriend, Bruce. She’s got plans afoot and they are fucking terrifying. There’s some space age Third Reich superior race type shit going down, I think she might be taking some personal days. Pepper’s gonna loan her a plane.” 

His stomach tightens.


	7. Chapter 7

A knot of cold hurt, and to be fair, frustrated need, drives him out of the lab a few hours later. It doesn’t occur to him to text or call, he just looks for Natasha in their usual haunts at the tower, and finds her in the gym.

She’s working both the gym sound system and the kickboxing dummy hard. She notices him straight off but continues pounding with red padded fists and lethal feet, in a driving rhythm of random combinations to the beat of something complicated and wordless, percussive like a siege. He waits, hands in his pockets until the song ends.

“JARVIS, store playlist for later.”

_“File name, Ms. Romanoff?”_

She pulls off the gloves and begins unwinding the hand wraps, black to differentiate them from Tony's white ones. She smirks, “Meditation.”

_“Changes saved.”_

“Thank you.” She sets her gear on the bench, turning her focus to Bruce.

“I guess I’m curious. Were you ever going to ask for my help?” He steps in closer, “Or...were you going to let me flounder around until I figured it out by osmosis from everyone else?”

She stands her ground, close enough to touch. “I needed to make sure...”

The knot winds tighter as the sentence hangs unfinished. This is just...disappointment is too strong, there’s still a chance to turn it around, if either of them are capable of that kind of negotiation.

He doesn’t want to give her the chance to use his reaction as leverage, so he reaches for her arm, wrapping his hand around her tricep. The connection spikes through him, and he feels an immediate sheen of perspiration from her heated skin at the point of contact, fueling his need to press further.

“So...I’d just wake up and you’d be gone.” Her hand clenches, flex of muscle against his palm. “Off on some mission somewhere, while I sit here with my thumb up my ass. Waiting for you to think of the warning text that’ll finally convince me to stop wanting answers. Wanting you.”

“They aren’t warnings.”

The dodge sounds ridiculous, and his reply is hotter than he’d intended. Not angry--strangely--but hurt at the lame attempt at gaslighting. “Of _course_ they’re warnings. They’re huge flashing road signs, Natasha.”

She crosses her arms, and the gesture feels like self-protection instead of bravado. “They’re not _just_ warnings.”

The anger drains, leaving a bone deep understanding that he’s the less broken party--damn it, he is the Pepper in this one--and so it’s up to him to lead the way out of this fight. He realizes the struggle here is to find a place where she can allow herself to ask him for something, or even anything at all, instead of getting twisted up with guilty gratitude for receiving basic, human care.

He lets go of her arm with a stroke down her forearm, unsure if she’s done pushing him into resistance, but choosing to stop pushing back. “How do I prove to you I’ll do anything you need me to do?”

She flinches, mouth tightening.

He’s never seen her flinch. Not in a sparring match with Cap, not in the field, never with him. “Just ask me. Please. Just fucking tell me what you need.”

Her gaze shifts downward, looking into the collar of his shirt instead of his face. He can almost see the tenderness in his voice searing her like warmth on a frostbite, but that only spurs him on.

“Even if you don’t know how to say it.”

She closes her eyes for a long moment, and her voice is rough when she speaks, “JARVIS. Push the Esposito file to Dr. Banner’s workspace. My access level.”

_“Yes, Ms. Romanoff.”_

She opens her eyes on an exhale. “I need you to look at something.”

~*~

When Bruce touches the new icon on his workspace JARVIS asks for biometric identification, and Bruce has to ask, “How many people have access to this file?”

_“Ms. Romanoff and you have access to real time updates of the file from all other parties: ASAC Renata Esposito, Mr. Barton, Ms. Potts, Mr. Stark. Updates are pushed to those other parties at the discretion of Ms. Romanoff. In case of her demise, Mr. Barton is to be upgraded to her access level.”_

He spreads his hand out to be scanned. “Interesting.”

The latest updates are from Pepper, who has been making discreet inquiries through the Maria Stark Foundation on the rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers; namely by opening dialogues with two small successful pilot programs and offering grants to help them scale up. The recruitment of talent to train a team stateside is left unsaid for now, but Bruce has heard Pepper’s work process, and can see that part coming.

Child super soldiers. He still can’t quite wrap his head around that when he looks at Natasha; or maybe he can, and it just makes too much sense to seem strange. He wonders if the kind of double-vision that entails is like people looking at him and remembering the Other Guy.

“Yeah,” he mutters as he scatters the information across every holoscreen in his corner of the lab, “I can see why this is a sore spot.”

Bruce is not sure which is more horrifyingly impressive, the suspected high-functioning animal-hoarding human experimentation of the unidentified kidnapper, or Natasha’s dispassionate analysis. Suppositions about the current program, structured interventions, plans, contingencies and strategy for taking it down are all laid out in subfolders, including human trials of a non-lethal weapon called an I.C.E.R. and whether it could be safe and effective on an age range of eight to eighteen.

The more he reads, the more obviously personal this case is for Natasha, but that has only made her more thorough.

He can see his piece in it--he’s not that kind of doctor, but he’s the closest to a consulting specialist on the serum they have, and he sees his name on the medical intervention team document written three days ago. The cache of information he has on her enhancement is more of a case study than research, but it’s better than nothing at all.

Thing is, he can’t see why she has been so circumspect about bringing him up to speed.

He gets to the photos of the girls, and he thinks about the little kid Natasha blithely paid to lure him to the outskirts of town for their introduction--they all have that same shrewd scrappy look in the eye. Bruce gets a bad feeling about how personal this could get.

Then he gestures open a subfolder that’s eyes-only for Natasha, Clint and himself, even though it’s labeled as an Eisenhower-era SSR archive file copied from the SHIELD database which is now mirrored all over the world by Natasha’s own hand. The anonymous kidnapper gains a name, Dr. Lyudmila Tikhonovna Kudrin.

Bruce doesn’t have to scroll back through Natasha’s texts to know that the low-res photo of the woman leading little Melodie away was of Dr. Kudrin, the unspoken ghoul-faced nanny with an umbrella like a scythe.

~*~

Natasha gives him forty-eight hours; time to process, time to brace herself. This isn’t something she wants to talk out, but she knows there are choices hanging heavily here, things beyond this mission and her own efforts at self-discovery and penance. He asked for her trust, her confidence, and all she could offer him was the narrative that Esposito and she have constructed.

The wait is agonizing, even with the distractions of laying the groundwork to bring in Steve, and the reconnaissance of suspected locations. She throws herself into the distractions because she’s out of her depth and her element with Bruce.

This isn’t a trade of knowledge, a haggling of skill for access for intel. She’s got enough emotional savvy to understand the pact of telling the people you love what you need from them...but she always figured those needs were along the lines of feed me, watch while I sleep, don’t betray me, bring me some soup.

That need could feel like both protection and terror, that love and want could mean handing someone the tools to gut you and walk away? Someone really should have told her that. There should be a handbook. She was wrong about this being a game for children.

On the third day he’s up by six to intercept her before ballet. He doesn’t say anything about their discussion, or the file, or any of her plans. 

“We should go back to Franklin,” he says. “Let’s see what we can put up against that baseline.”

~*~

“I won’t say this is hypothetical, because you’re a smart guy.”

Steve’s eyes narrow, and he steps onto the mat warily.

“I’m working on a side op. It’s in the intel stages, but eventually there will be a ground confrontation. I want to get your thoughts on non-lethal tactics against nontraditional opponents.”

“I get the feeling you don’t mean junkyard dogs.”

Natasha raises her brows thoughtfully, “That might not be a bad idea to keep in mind. Junkyard dogs with guns.”

“I see,” he says, meaning that he understands that’s all he’s getting right now and he does not approve. “Well, let’s work with that for a bit. Junkyard dogs with guns.”

“I’m going to come at you with this,” Natasha pulls a blade from the rack on the wall. It’s a dulled training blade, but he knows she can drive enough force to push it into him anyway. “Try to subdue me with the least amount of injuries.”

“So...beloved junkyard dogs with guns.”

She nods, then runs to the side to gain altitude from the bench and a ricochet off the wall to land on his back.

~*~

The leads turn out to be the three bears.

The first is a former hospital outside of Elmira, NY: too big and too remote, desolate like an asylum, but whatever nefarious things going on there had more to do with the local meth community. She and Clint fly back the same day, and she returns in a blacker mood than she’d started with.

Renata eliminates the second, an orphanage in Davis, CA. A community development organization has stepped in and scheduled demolition and re-zoning for an outlet mall.

Madame would never be sloppy enough to risk a location with that kind of ambiguity. She’d always had a concept of the Red Room as an institution.

That left Lozen Academy, Denton, TX.

~*~

The trees are splintered and scattered like lincoln logs, and a misplaced and now downed power line has fizzed to a stop thanks to the SI crew still staying in town. The ground is awash in silt and pond water smell from the contents of an old water tower Stark had spilled over the fire. His reward was shorting out the suit when the powerline whipped up and caught a vulnerable join between armor plates, and only his recent Thor-mods saved him from electrocution.

The giddiness of that first protocol run is absent despite this being more of a technical success. 

Banner had been focused, intent on the training mission Steve had given, “clear that hillside”, but the rawness of his emotional state had spilled over, and everyone’s ears were still ringing from the inchoate bellowing. She checks them into a motel to get some rest instead of piling straight into the van for hours to ferment in that mood.

Clint falls across the first bed moments after they key into the room, and Steve hits the shower with the absurdly large bottle of calamine lotion he packed. Bruce falls asleep in the chair as soon as he sits down. She gets a Coke from the vending machine in the hall, and sits on the bed next to Clint, drinking from the can. 

Spent adrenaline will have Clint out for a good hour, but Bruce's metabolism is working through a huge hit of chaos. His sleep is dreamless and boneless, and he's wedged himself into the chair expertly, arms tucked and head to the side, feet propped on the dresser. A hard reboot is part of the pattern, like after a migraine or a seizure, but the only time it had been longer than a nap was when he took Mjolnir right above the ear. 

She keeps watch, sipping. Steve has run a bath, which means the water heater in this place is set dangerously hot, and he will be there for a while watching Barney Miller episodes on his tablet. 

Bruce wakes with a start, and stops scanning the room when he sees her, unconcerned, sitting back against the headboard. 

He looks at her, assessing, as he scratches the back of his head, then mouths, ”Let’s take a walk.”

She nudges Clint, who rouses long enough to register with a grunt that she’ll be back after a while, and they head out the door.

The damp chill gives her shivers when they step out. The motel caters to people on their way up into the mountains for hunting and fishing. Not much around here but more nothing, and desolate on a weekday. She waits for him to have something to say.

Instead, after they’re far enough away from the motel to be enveloped by the white noise of insects and wind through leaves, even the light road traffic smothered by the deep full stillness of nature, he reaches over and takes her hand.

He's still running hot, and he rubs some of that warmth into her hand before he laces her fingers with his. They try a few versions, shuffling fingers until they find one with maximum balanced contact, sleeves slipped out of the way for a full palm press. They each grip so tight that she can feel their bones creak together. 

Warmth is slowly creeping up through her body as they walk. The silence stretching between them has become something other than quiet - anticipation, maybe, adrenaline-fueled, definitely. 

When he stood down this time there was a challenge on the Other Guy's face, a great ape sentience emphasizing that he was choosing to do this, granting her request. It was unsettling and terrifying, and as heady as these breathless moments between them when they push another step forward. She’d stroked soothingly along the finer skin of his wrist, mirroring a gesture he’d used on her over diner breakfasts. The texture was raw silk, and she watched the curiously familiar play of expression as the calm welled up out of him like an idea forming. 

Now their hands link together in a death grip neither seems willing to lessen. She feels shaky, hyper-aware of him and of her own agitation. She feels like if she lets go she’ll lose something--irrational, but this loosens neither her fingers nor his, so she’s pretty sure he’s working through a similar anxiety.

She came out here expecting a conversation, a negotiation of some kind. Another trade. But he’s not talking.

She’d be willing to wander in the woods with him for now, but she suspects he doesn’t know where he’s going either. She tugs him to a stop, and he turns toward her.

There’s the intent and focused look on his face he employs when he’s working. She’s seen that same look twice now when the Hulk stands down; finding the thread of intention and following it home. That gaze focused solely on her, coming from Bruce, is powerful in an entirely different way. Another shiver comes up through her, not from the chill, but he pulls her closer, letting go of her fingers to wrap his hands around hers and hold them to his chest, keeping her warm.

“Later...” he says finally, voice scratchy and thick, “we should talk about today.”

She nods. 

“Probably,” he continues, practically mumbling--stalling, she thinks. Finding his own proper grip on risk and want and control. “We should probably talk about a lot of things. That file. This…and I don’t have any vodka.”

She dismisses the notion, her patience starting to fray. It's not like the vodka gambit worked for her, after all. 

“But right this minute,” he says, moving closer to her, and she unclenches her fists, spreading them out against his chest, taking in all of the heat he’s throwing off. He moves a hand to the back of her neck, and she doesn’t let him finish the thought. She’s so tired of waiting, of balancing risk, assessing threats. She wants something for herself. Now. Here. She pulls him down by the shirt to meet his mouth.

There’s nothing soft about this kiss. He fists his hand in her hair, pulling slightly at her nape and it stings in the best way possible, zinging through her body. She digs fingernails into his shoulder, feeling like she’s on fire - the heat of his mouth, his body, lips bruising together, and they’re out there in the open, nothing handy to lean up against, no walls or barriers or doors to slam into, just the desperation of the kiss, the clutching need for touch.

She pulls away for a second to breathe, the tang of his skin luscious in the crisp air. His mouth moves to her jaw, stubble rough and then tongue gentle by her ear, his hands clenching against her back, working under her shirt to spread across her skin and she moans at the contact, the sound absurd in this empty space. She palms his neck to move him so she can get her own hands on more of his flesh. In return his teeth graze against the soft skin of her neck but the shudder makes her shove him back a little.

They need to pause to regroup or they’re going to fuck in the dirt, out here in the open, and she’s not sure she cares.

For a moment she just appreciates how roughed up and debauched he looks already, smears on his glasses and mouth lush, then she grabs his hand and presses it to the front of her hip. “I have the keys,” she says. “To the van.”

By unspoken agreement, they don’t touch on the way back, eagerness and desperation and the knowledge that they’re planning on climbing into the SI Sprinter van to make out like horny teenagers is enough to both fuel the illicit rush and threaten to bring the whole thing crashing to a halt.

She pulls the keys out of her pocket while his hands draw her hips back against him, his mouth hot behind her ear. He presses her against the metal door and she can feel the wanting, the way it courses between them both as he moves against her, hand sliding down her belly about to give her a little friction back. And then his stomach growls, loud and long and rumbling against her back. They both freeze for a moment, but the ridiculousness catches up with them.

His metabolism is running riot. She turns in his arms and he lets his head drop against the window, banging in a gentle rhythm of bemused frustration.

She starts to giggle, a giddy hysterical feeling, and then they both stop when the banging is matched on the other side. 

“Banner? Romanoff? Hey, Nat?” Steve doesn’t sound that concerned. “Do you guys have the keys? I’m dying for a cheeseburger.”

She closes her eyes, which doesn’t hide the eyeroll, and whispers, “So Clint has this theory that the serum has super cockblocking side-effects.”

Bruce concedes, “His theory has merit, sadly.”

“I hate all of you,” she pulls him by the neck into a fierce quick kiss, then shoves him away so she can get into the driver’s seat.

~*~

She didn’t really give him a choice. “Pack a bag, just for overnight.”

He’s working on a smartphone medlab dongle to be used for first aid in underdeveloped areas, a thing he and Tony had tossed around like hobbyists. He finds the project appealing, something small to work on while trying to shore up his research and the protocols with the enhancements. Different types of good for different types of people.

He’d been deep into this when she came in, sat on his desk, hooked her foot on the highest rung of his lab stool, and told him to pack.

“Hawaii?” he asked, “The Caribbean?” 

Her knee is distractingly close. He’s dizzy with the acceleration of his need for her. It’s dangerous, but he can’t quite help himself. It’s possible that he’s spent the last two nights imagining his mouth against the inner aspect of that perfect thigh, his fingers clenched around the outer, moving up along that milky, beautiful skin. He feels like three people - the man, the monster, and this person he is now, almost dissociative with want for a woman who can kill a squad of Hydra without breaking a sweat, and whose mental strength puts that to shame.

They’d completely passed over a middle ground. They’d never even been on a date--did people still date? The thought cracked him up, dinner and a movie and groping on a couch while the dog watched. Maybe necking in the forest counted, after all.

She clarifies, “Pack for hot, but not in a good way.”

“Anywhere without superheroes,” he says, quirking a smile at her, “is hot in a good way.”

She smirks back. “Super Cockblocking Serum.”

It’s something. He takes his glasses off and sets them on the keyboard. They’d bent one of the temples necking in the forest, so they’re safer being evacuated. “Is it Santa Cruz? Please tell me it’s Santa Cruz.” 

It could be a flophouse on 72nd at this point if it were private and relatively clean. That’s half a lie. He has allowed himself a small fantasy--one he hasn’t indulged in for so long that it feels dirtier than the visions he’s had of holding her wrists over her head, sliding inside of her and seeing her face uncontrolled, open to him as they both break--he imagines clean sheets, open windows, privacy, maybe room service, maybe wandering into the kitchen naked for a snack, just...being with her, rolling around with her, sleeping and reading and fucking in a bed that smells like them both.

It’s a fantasy he’ll never share with her. It’s pedestrian, coming from the part of him that once upon a time had a life where that was feasible. But that’s not the life he’s living. 

“Texas,” she says. “I need to see the location in person. Talk to some folks, confirm our intel. I thought,” she pauses for a moment to move her foot back onto the lower rung and slide forward on the desk, that thigh now pressing directly against the inside of his, perilously close to home. He moves his hand to the back of the knee and registers the slight narrowing of her eyes as her breath hitches. “I thought you might want to come.”

“ _With_ you?” He skates his fingers along the top of her calf and the back of her thigh. “That would be a welcome change.”

He can feel desire pulse in his throat, his groin, an unsettling echo of the moments prior to his change, but anger is the last thing coursing through him and her gaze is so intent that when she bites her lip, he tightens the hold on her calf. She leans towards him and he starts to reach for her.

“Bruce, I think a hundred phones is too many for a pilot project,” Stark yells from just outside his entrance to the shared lab space.

She slides back, crossing her leg so the spot he’d been touching is now pressed against the other knee, and he sees the thigh squeeze where she gives herself a little jolt. He smirks and runs his knuckles down her shin as he yells back, “So change it.”

She whispers, “Super. Cockblocking. Serum.” 

He grimaces. “How does that explain Tony?”

“We leave at four,” she says, hopping off the desk in a smooth motion. “Pack light.”

Tony comes over and joins him in watching her walk away. Bruce scrubs his face, tries to find a deep center of calm.

“It might be easier,” Stark says after a pause, “To just set yourself on fire.”

“You really need to stop confusing me with Pepper.”

~*~

On the positive side, he’s pretty sure that her piloting is no more terrifying than her driving. On the negative, putting himself in such a small lightweight aircraft was an act of faith that required all of his attention, and while he wasn’t sure if this was a business trip, a hot date, or both, he neither wanted to puke, nor turn and kill her by busting up the plane on the way down from cruising altitude. He sits in the seat and does a lot of deep slow breathing as ocean waves wash into his ears from the headphones.

She'd logged a flight plan, rented a car, scoped out a plan for investigation once in town. He doesn’t ask in whose name she booked any of it, as they drive from the small airfield to the motel.

Denton, Texas is the mutt of a suburb sired off a bedroom community, recently moving into respectability with a university that meant a fluctuating population and a certain “look the other way” attitude. 

The file contained the reasoning behind the location selections, but while it was the best shot left, Denton was an outlier. The population statistics and demographics didn’t jibe with the civic disinterest that seemed required, but when he asked she’d shrugged and said, “Texas. The land of mind your own business.”

They drop their stuff at an anonymous motel, white sheets and privacy yes, but instead of room service there’s a vague promise of continental breakfast, and a comforter with bilious orange flowers and curtains the color and texture of oatmeal. Still, it’s clean, and far away from the ice machine. It’s a slice of heaven.

There’s only one bed. He sits on the edge of it and watches as she strips, redresses, and makes up her face with the precise efficiency of sighting in a scope. 

“Put your dancin’ shoes on, doc,” she says, watching him watch her in the mirror. “We’re going out.”

Her jeans are so tight that he’s pretty sure someone’s going to get into a fight tonight. Cowboy boots, a white tank top, a soft plaid poplin shirt so thin he can see the flush of her skin through it, worn open, and she’s someone else. He can tell by the lipstick.

She makes him change his shoes, musses his hair with something sticky and tells him to follow her lead.

“That,” he says,” is what I’m afraid of.”


	8. Chapter 8

The bar is a few streets down from the motel, and just divey enough for authenticity, as much stage set as organic watering hole, typical of the area. She rounds up a couple of beers and shots, scopes out the pool table, darts, jukebox. Settles on a table near the darts. It’s a Thursday. If it were Friday, people would probably dance in the little open space, knocking against each other and indulging in some illicit groping.

She’d briefed him on the walk over. Lozen Academy was an all-girl’s boarding school outside of town, which seemed to specialize in either brilliant or troubled kids, depending on who you asked. They were small, but the building was a former Carmelite orphanage with plenty of room to grow, and was sited on extensive acreage.

“It sounds like most of the staff also live on campus, but they contract out facility maintenance. This is the closest bar between the Academy and the subdivision where two of the part-time guys rent a house. Full time employees will have been vetted by the Academy, but the janitorial company isn’t going to think twice about sending one of the part-timers to change keys or do odd tasks the company doesn’t want to schedule a full-time employee to do.”

She’d also gone over their roles for the night. Amber: ER nurse and adrenaline junkie, likes to two-step because her dad taught her, and laughs too loud and drinks too much on the weekend. She grew up outside of Enid, moved to the big city. They’re thinking of moving from Oklahoma to Denton so her boyfriend can teach at the University. He’s got an interview in the morning, but she wants him to loosen up and ace it. She’s using him as a reason to move out of Tulsa.

Kyle: teaches physics, which is more math than she needed to learn for dosing, but they connected over science. It’s a variation on Kate and Robbie, less loyalty but a similar power dynamic, the same sense of why a good time girl would connect with a staid older guy. 

She loses at darts, rubbing against him as she laughs, on the fine edge of making a spectacle of herself, until they settle into a table.

Bruce sips at his beer. It’s after eight, and the place is filling up. She slips out of the poplin shirt, downs the whisky and nudges him to give her money for the jukebox, sliding her eyes slightly to a guy nursing his second beer at the bar behind her. She’s definitely working. 

“I just need confirmation,” she says, “before we head out there in the morning.”

He hands over the quarters she’d given him earlier with instructions, and she kisses his cheek noisily, whispering in his ear, “That one’s gonna be an ass grabber. I’ll bet you a dollar.”

The mark’s eyes track her as she swaggers towards the juke box. He’s not alone. That swagger is something.

Her mark follows her to the jukebox and Bruce rolls the bottle around on the table. He knows what he needs to do - start the argument, leave her alone. He doesn’t love it but it’s not like she isn’t capable of taking care of herself. 

Her smile is bright and false, and he watches as she leans towards the guy, taking his suggestions. She gestures over her shoulder, waves at him, and they linger for a minute and then head back to the table.

Harvey is younger up close, good looking but quickly running to seed, the standard white male alley cat you see working construction, but Harvey’s uncle was a handyman and gave him a leg up. On a normal day he’s probably smart enough to know that he’s out of Amber’s league, but the spell she’s spinning has him twitterpated: flirtatious, just a little too warm, not neglecting her boyfriend per se, but making Harvey feel like the bigger cock of the walk.

Harvey side eyes Bruce a few times, gauging, but Bruce goes for unconcerned. Maybe Harvey will assume he just likes to watch. Eventually Harvey stops checking.

Bruce takes it in with a growing sense of unease. Seeing Natasha turn herself off so effortlessly, become so completely someone she’s fabricated--perhaps on the walk over--that it seems there’s no fourth wall to even break..it gives him a sense of just how hard she’s been working to stay present in herself with him. 

He admires her skill, but doesn’t enjoy seeing her use it, certainly not here, so potentially close to the person who built those skills into her and left her to scrabble and scrape for her own identity in a vacuum, absent of love and support.

The jukebox finally winds around to the song she’d manipulated Harvey into picking, and she bounces a little in her seat. “C’mon babe, let’s dance.” There’s no one else dancing. He knows to shake his head, say no. She asks again and he refuses more sharply, and hurt settles on her face until Harvey offers up his hand. 

She deliberately doesn’t seek Bruce’s approval, stands up with Harvey, and moves to the small dance floor. All eyes are on them. The sway of her hips, the curve of her body in the white shirt, the deep pink straps of her bra peeking at her shoulders, the vibrancy of her.

She’s like all the other girls in the bar, but hyper-realized. Harvey holds her at the waist and hand, a showy snap to his two-step.

Bruce looks away to take in the rest of the room, then glances back to see Harvey’s hand slipping down over her ass.

Suddenly Bruce freezes, his visual field searing white around the edges, the pounding heartbeat coming out of nowhere. He grips the edges of the table and stands so abruptly the chair falls back. 

What. The. Everliving. Fuck.

~*~

Natasha forces herself to stay exactly where she is, to use the fear and concern coursing through her to sell Amber being peeved and reckless. He walked away. This is a good thing. It’s a Thing That Helps. He walked away, upright and determined. He has a key to the room. She shares an eye roll with Harvey and sets about finishing the job.

Amber fishes for information on whether the school is hiring nurses or tutors, since they seem to have so many scholarship kids staying over the summer. Harvey talks about some tiling work he did in the basement last year, which struck him as messed up because who even has basements in the wet clay of North Texas?

~*~

It’s autopilot that gets him out of the bar and onto the next block. When his hands stop shaking enough so he can get one into his pocket, he texts her, _had to leave_ , and takes a moment for triage.

Things That Help come in two major flavors. Preventives included the standard basic care for a chronic condition, like good sleep hygiene. Bruce also determinedly built up his capacity for dealing with stress; not avoiding annoyance, practicing mindfulness, and regularly getting his heart rate up in neutral contexts like running and beating off.

Acute interventions included walking away, minor property damage--like scratching around a bug bite, this could backfire if it felt too good to stop--and down the list at the occasional level, getting drunk.

Counter-intuitively, Bruce has fled a bar only to head to a liquor store.

He inherited a few things from his father besides the propensity to break Banner DNA, but liver function was none of them. Bruce drank socially, one or two, and it loosened and elevated him. At three, he started rolling the dice on a buzz concurrent with a hangover. Slamming through four or more in quick succession was a pretty reliable purgative for body and soul, offering rock solid reassurance that Bruce was not his father. 

He points to higher than middle on the shelves, like paying the extra money for premium gasoline, and grabs a lemonade for the sugar content.

The clerk starts to chide him about needing a chaser for sipping whisky but Bruce just looks at him, silently asking if he really wants the transaction to last any longer than necessary. Unsurprisingly, the man makes a good choice.

Bruce applies the whisky like medication, toeing his shoes off as he takes a long pull, measuring shots by swallows.

The buzz is numbing and euphoric and after a while the dependable nausea kicks in like an old friend. For Bruce, there were few things farther from beating anyone’s ass than riding a serious bed spin for dear life.

~*~

Natasha is relieved when she steps into the motel room, cold from the air-conditioning cranked high and smelling of bourbon. The bathroom light is the only one on. Bruce lies on the bed like he sat down at the edge and just flopped back, arms spread out and fingers clearly having released a hard clench on the bedspread. His shirt is half unbuttoned and his feet are bare.

“Did you throw up?” she asks, picking up the bottle of bourbon. It’s only half empty, and she’s pretty sure he spilled some on the carpet. She takes a swig. Trust Bruce to buy the decent bourbon in an effort to get just drunk enough.

“I don’t always puke,” he says, laying an arm over his eyes.

His glasses are on the bathroom counter, half folded like they were pulled off and tossed with prejudice. The bathroom is clean but the counter is wet and there’s a hand towel crumpled under the sink.

“Are you alright?” he asks, sounding so worn down it pulls at her. She sets his glasses on the nightstand and sits beside him on the bed, flopping back and tucking her head into the crook of his armpit.

He smells like toothpaste. 

“Fine, yes,” he concedes, “I threw up.”

“You’re such a cheap date...” She almost calls him Doc, the verbal wink of when she teases him, but he sounds half a wreck and she finds she doesn’t want even that distance.

“I’m sorry,” he says, softly. “I just...I had to take a walk.”

She rolls over, making his upper arm her pillow, and lays her hand softly on his belly. She takes in the steady rise of his breath, the human temperature, the beat of his pulse in his throat punctuated by the occasional guarded swallow. He’s himself, emotionally agitated, but not compromised. Not anymore. But that doesn’t mean he’s okay.

He pushes again. “Are you alright?” He drops his arm from his face and covers the hand resting on his belly. Completes the circuit.

“I’m fine.” She emphasizes the word. “And I was right. We were right.”

He stays quiet, so she keeps talking.

“Harvey couldn’t hold his liquor. Got sloppy. I might have left him in the alley.”

It’s possible that Harvey wouldn’t make it through the month once his employers’ employers realized he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to feel bad about that. 

“Bruce,” she says finally, “what happened?”

There’s a long, awkward silence. She resists the urge to fist her hand in his shirt and shake him. Instead, she counts his breaths, sees a slight flush rise on his cheeks.

“He got jealous.” She dismisses the sheepish embarrassment to his tone; it’s the weariness beneath it that makes her lift up on her elbow, pay even closer attention. 

He continues, flat and hollow. “And I didn’t have control. Just for a second. But it was long enough.”

“Huh.” She is momentarily floored. 

He rolls to face her, reluctant to raise his head but angling so he can look up at her. He lifts his hand to her cheek, catching the curl falling over her eye and smoothing it back, running it between his fingers and thumb like worrying at a ribbon. His fingers shake a little, and Natasha wonders when he ate last.

“It wasn’t me, exactly,” he tries to explain. “But he’s not differentiating--can’t see the subtleties between you and the role. I think he likes you.” His smile rings a little false, and she can hear the fear there, the anger riding close behind. No normal for them--not ever, it seems.

“I could have hurt someone. Hell, I could have hurt everyone because the Other Guy has a goddamned crush.”

She wants to ground him, somehow, and slips her hand under his shirt to rest on his waist. She strokes the skin there, warm and firm and human. It’s the first time she’s touched him like that, skin to skin, to soothe, to promise. The situation is serious, but she wants more of this--and she thinks it may be their way out. She likes simple solutions to complicated puzzles.

“I like him too,” she says softly. “When he’s not trying to kill me.”

Bruce makes that wry noise that translates in both his incarnations.

“But you,” she says, and moves down towards him, giving him every chance to roll away. “I like all the time.”

This time, the kiss is gingerly slow and deliberate, his hand falling to her shoulder. She withdraws, careful to keep in physical contact, her hand running down his leg as she moves to stand between his knees and take her shirt off. She realizes the boots may be an issue.

“Stand up,” she says.

“Natasha. I don’t think...”

“I’m not trying to rob you of your virtue, Bruce. I can’t take these boots off myself.”

He sighs, marshalling himself to his feet while she lies on the bed, leaning back on her elbows. He tugs and drops the boots indiscriminately, taking her socks with them. She unbuttons the jeans, wriggles them over her hips, and he pulls them off as well and sends them toward the chair.

He halts and looks down at her. The mix of anger, self-pity, self-mockery, it all slips away for something else to play over his features. He slides his hand under her calf, a momentary caress to crook her leg as he bends to brush lips over her knee like a whisper, and then he lets go. She stands up into the space he leaves when he straightens, opening the last few buttons and shucking off his shirt, and they fumble together with his pants until they’re both standing there in their underwear.

She takes his hand, tugs him to follow her to the shower and starts the water.

He’s leaning against the sink, watching her, eyes darker, worrying his bottom lip between finger and thumb, and she feels that want for him that’s been coursing through her for longer than she cares to admit. It’s matched with something else she can't begin to define, but she knows the steps to take and she hopes it will translate.

“You keep putting me back together,” she says, and her own voice is husky. “Let me…”

He reaches out to pull her to him, hugging her fiercely.

She wraps her arms around his back, holding tight and breathing in the scent of his neck. He kisses the top of her head, her cheekbone, cups her face to kiss her mouth. While he’s occupied she hooks her fingers in his boxers and slides them down his thighs, then reaches back to unsnap her bra and strip off her own underwear in one quick motion

“I thought,” he protests softly, some humor finally back in his voice as he watches the pieces fall to the tile. “I’d really hoped I was going to get to do that.”

“Yeah,” she says, kicking everything out into the room where it won't get wet, “we can try that later.”

~*~

She gently manhandles him into the shower, which is cooler than he’d have chosen but is working on the sick hollow headache of the lingering booze. Or it may be that her hands on his body are stripping him of lingering doubt along with the tattered remnants of rational thought.

She’s not trying to get him clean or get him off, really, just maybe cool him down and soothe him. She presses her mouth against his shoulder, nips gently at his collar bones, washes his back. She turns him toward the spray and he lets it beat on his face while she slides her arms around his waist to fit herself against his back, cheek resting on his scapula.

He’s glad that she can’t see the harsh grimace on his face, the alcohol and anger and fear induced welling of his eyes as he’s struck by her capacity for ruthless kindness. He holds her hands in place, and lets her hold him up, just for a moment.

He hadn’t anticipated such tenderness from her.

He’s not sure which hypothesis affects him more: that she had such gestures of care, long neglected, in her repertoire, or that she’s been able to translate and reflect back the few moments between them where he was trying to soothe her. He’s awed at her mind and her heart.

Then he turns, allowing himself to look at her. The dark red of her hair, slicked back by the water, her face washed mostly clean of the makeup--the stripped down, astonishing presence of her. He shuffles her around so she can get her own time under the showerhead. She closes her eyes, head back, and lust spikes back through him. There’s not much he can do about it right now. At his age with that much booze, even after puking, it would be an exercise in frustration for him--and they haven’t laid much groundwork for him to simply take care of her instead. But there’s no reason not to touch her, to luxuriate in her strength and beauty.

She opens her eyes and he kisses her, gliding the back of his fingers over her breast, turning his palm to cup it, thumb rubbing over the nipple. She winds her arms around his neck, and her slick, lush body against his makes his head spin. He’s half hard against her, but that’s mostly just a show of good faith. The shower’s too small for anything but frottage, so he runs his hand down her back to the swell of her hip, the curve of her ass. 

She deepens the kiss and bends her knee up to curl her leg around him, pulling him more tightly to her and teasing his other thigh with her foot. She skims her hand down his belly between them to grasp him, and he groans against her mouth as she strokes him with playful skittering fingers. The warmth of her skin, the slickness from the water is too much for him to break it off, to manage her expectations, it’s been a very long time since anyone else has taken him in hand. 

He leans against the tile to slouch a little, drop his shoulder so he can slip fingers under that last curve of thigh to stroke against soft lips, get another angle on what she's riding against his leg, lush and lazy. 

For all of the constrained grappling under the spray, there’s little sense of urgency aside from the generous give and take of pleasure, languid fondling of mouths and tongues and hands without a goal.

The feeling of hollowness has turned to one of fierce contentment; gratitude, even.

“Let’s go to bed,” he murmurs to her, and they separate and towel off.

It’s not the kind of place with robes, so she digs a t-shirt from his bag and pulls it over her head, handing him pajama bottoms with an arched eyebrow.

They’re scheduled to leave by four, with a busy day ahead. She crawls into the bed, and he slides in beside her, puts his arm around her waist and presses his mouth against her shoulder. She nestles her ass against him and promptly falls asleep, throwing off heat like a nuclear bomb.

He wants to stay awake: to bleed off the remnant of the headache, to savor touching her, to imagine an evening that ends with them both breathless and sated, not simply warm and damp. He falls asleep anyway.

~*~

He wakes to find her sitting cross-legged on the bed next to him, hair a riot of mashed curls, still wearing his t-shirt and nothing else. There’s thin coffee and a stale muffin next to his glasses, which are clean when he puts them on.

He sits up in bed, watching her scroll through her tablet. He can smell the sleepy scent of her around him. He reaches out, brushing fingers down her forearm. She looks over at him.

“I know you’re working,” he says, “but thank you.”

She nods and combs her fingers through his hair, light gaze of fingernails on his scalp. He drinks the coffee, leans over to kiss her shoulder, and goes to find aspirin and to shower the pillow dent out of the side of his hair.

~*~

Lozen Academy is on the outskirts of town, and while he’s not sure what kind of info she can glean from just seeing it, he suspects its probably a little like sizing up your opponent in person. You get a feel from it. His feeling about the school is that bad shit is gonna go down and he wants her as far away from it as possible. It strengthens his desire to do what she needs, to listen as she figures it out.

“More girls than I was hoping for,” she says, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. “Bigger age range. That complicates it.”

Bruce follows Natasha’s lead all morning without incident, listening, watching, admiring the way she handles people and processes data. Her questions are all perfectly ordinary but lead to a series of conclusions that none of their subjects would have reached on their own. He notices that sometimes she drops a word or phrase early in the conversation and then circles back from another angle once their subconscious has had time to make associations.

They visit the facility management company under the guise of using them for an office building for the smartphone project. They casually run into a woman who taught mathematics a few years back in the middle-school grades, who’d left to get her Masters in Ed but was still social with a couple current staff. They talk to a clerk at a wholesale food supplier, new to the company, who gives them a ridiculous amount of information about Lozen’s standing order. 

The way she teases out truth in rumors, hones in on the core of information within both wild stories and seemingly tedious details, makes a connection with a person and then takes what they tell her--and what they don’t--and makes connections in her case...Bruce is aware he’s watching a master at work.

He ticks through the phone list she gave him, talking to less sensitive contacts at the municipal electric and the water utility, the woman who runs the county geographic information department, the local cable and telecom company to find out about plans, rates, and what might be required to keep perfect service in play. The school had to be burning through money. He wondered where it came from, if there was an endowment or donors...or clientele.

She’s silent on the ride back to the airstrip, and he can see she’s processing, working through things and figuring out next steps. She’ll share when she’s ready.

In New York he goes back to the lab, exhausted but feeling the need to make progress on his piece, work his own craft.

At two in the morning she breaks into his room, wakes him up to shove him to one side of the bed and crawls in with him. He fits himself to her body and falls back to sleep.

~*~

“Steve and I are working on some ways to subdue without fatalities.”

He can make toast, so he’s made her a pile of it like a centerpiece at the table. She still steals the piece off his plate. He puts the stack aside for Steve. “That sounds...painful.”

“I think you should watch.”

He’s seen footage of them all fighting, studied it with them to determine where he and Tony could shore up their equipment or give them a technical advantage. When things are going down though, he’s always been sequestered, hewing to an alpha wave because his main job is to stay in the holster. “That sounds equally painful.”

“I win as often as I lose.” She grins, sipping the tea she’d brewed strong enough to chew. 

“Does you winning,” he shifts his glasses back up his nose, feeling it’s important to clarify, “still involve you getting whaled on?”

“Sometimes.”

Which is how he ends up watching Steve and Natasha take turns pinning each other to the mats in the gym, an uncomfortable reworking of how he’d rather be spending the afternoon.

~*~

As if to prove a collective point, everyone shows up for dinner that night, wandering in to eat beef stroganoff and green salad which is the only thing she can make. She usually bargains with Steve, trades him cooking duty for clean up. She’d been too busy to remember it was her turn until her reminder went off, so she cooks and tries not to burn the meat, and wonders if you can lose your mind from want.

Frustrated, she suggests poker instead of movies. Steve can bluff, but Clint is a ringer, always playing dumb. Stark just spends time peeking at Pepper’s hand and explaining the rules to Thor, who’d only played the Culver University strip version, which apparently had very different house rules. 

Bruce clearly can’t concentrate any more than she can.

He follows her into the kitchen, dumping beer bottles in the cleverly hidden bin for returnables. He opens the refrigerator door, and she ducks under his arm to come up between him and the chill, hooking fingers into his belt loops. 

“Maybe there’ll be another alien invasion,” he sighs. “And they’ll all have to go save the world.”

“And we’d stay behind, fuck in the kitchen.”

“Yes. I would happily let aliens take over if it meant we could properly debase that butcher block over there in peace.”

That he says it so matter-of-factly only makes it easier to visualize: smooth oiled surface, a bit lower than the cold chrome counters, sturdy--his reconnaissance is sound. She hands him bottles of beer and tea, gliding fingers over his side, not wanting to tease but unable to stop. He smiles wanly and they go back to the game, where she takes everyone’s money in revenge.

Bruce heads to bed around one, but Clint is up and wired, having caught her agitated mood, and he pesters her to help him test out a new grappling harness and armor. The easy interaction between them is a soothing distraction.

Afterward as they coil rope, Clint asks, faux casual, “So...how are things?”

Natasha whips the rope in a back and forth circuit between her neck and wrist, more roughly than usual. “We’re proving your theory about the serum.”

Clint watches her separate the sides of the butterfly coil off her neck, wrap and tie it, and holds the bag out to receive it before clarifying. “Are you referring to the super cockblocking effect? Because I thought that was mainly a Steve thing. I’d lay money on Banner being a close second to me in having normal human experience to fall back on.”

“It’s more of a privacy thing.”

Clint’s incredulous eyebrow is going to get a charlie horse. "Are you two really that cheap that you'd both rather die of blue balls than spring for a hotel room?"

For two people you could drop virtually anywhere on earth--in his case possibly from orbit--certain they’d make their way fine, it was hard for her to explain what this territoriality was about. It felt like it needed to be where they lived, a place they controlled, at least the first time. "It's the principal of the thing." 

"Laura and I have this neat trick where we kick the kids outside. Or just tell 'em to go watch tv and shut the bedroom door."

"They don't have any weird expectations about what's going on. You can get a glass of juice after and not have to deal with awkwardness."

It felt vulnerable. Not the sex, but staying out of character the whole time. She wasn't sure she could pull it off if there were any hint of audience. 

“Right, no awkwardness.” Clint stashes the bags of rope in the cabinets "Cooper avoids eye contact, but it doesn't stop him from playing loudly in the next room--we gave him headphones so we could stop fucking to video game music. Lila just looks at you matter of fact and says, 'sex?', like confirming you're going to be late because 'traffic?'” He shakes his head, fond exasperation that his daughter turned out just as blunt as himself. “The real thing--when you're not selling a dream--comes with some awkwardness attached."

By the time she invades Bruce’s room, he just flops the covers over for her and mumbles sleepily, “I’d’ve left the door open, but I worry Tony will wander in like a cat.”

She snorts, snugs herself to his back with an arm over his waist and her thigh propped up against his ass. He tangles his fingers in hers, murmuring something about sneaking around and sex farces, and passes back out.


	9. Chapter 9

He hands her tea, holds up a finger, and pulls a power bar out of his pocket. 

She arches her brow, and his grin is a thousand watts. “Tony just texted me--from London. Steve has some sort of breakfast date, and I have no idea where your partner in crime is but we’re not due to meet for anything today, so odds are he’ll be in late if he’s in at all, and for the life of me I cannot come up with a reason for Thor to be in this universe today.”

She feels an answering grin spread over her face. “No superheroes in the building.”

“Not a one.” She hands him back the tea, rips open the power bar. They walk quickly and she dispatches half the snack before pitching the rest in favor of taking his hand and hustling them faster towards the tower. The urgency is matched by a giddy delight. No life-threatening situations, no tests, no obligations. Just a morning freed of anything but the time for each other. She can’t stop smiling. It feels foreign, it feels amazing.

They separate briefly in the elevator, and when they step into the hallway near his room, she tugs at his t-shirt, still slightly damp from his run, and slides her fingers under the waistband of his sweats. “Room surveillance?”

“Taken care of.”

“You put a t-shirt over the camera didn’t you?”

He grins. “Can’t do anything about the audio.”

“Fuck it,” she says, and slips her hand further, the muscle of his glute firm and delightful under her palm. She squeezes, laughing, and he wraps his arm around her waist, kissing her sloppily while she laughs against his mouth. He hauls her up and she wraps around him, an arm across his shoulders and thighs gripping his waist as his hands make a seat for her ass. 

They stumble through the door, kissing frantically, and she releases her grip on his hair to slam the door shut with her fingertips.

She can’t stop laughing as he drops her onto the bed, pulls off her warm ups as she peels off her sweater. 

He grabs the back of his t-shirt, pulling it over his head and grimacing a little. “I should shower.”

She shakes her head. “I like you sweaty.” He drops the shirt, catches her ankle and then looks flummoxed. She pokes at him with toes.

He pokes her back through the reinforced hole in the sole of the tights.

She starts to laugh even harder, kneeling up and running her cheek up his belly. “I’ll explain later.” 

“Different coefficients of friction?” he suggests, bending to kiss her, hands busy with the thin straps of her leotard.

“You dork,” she says before he catches her mouth, tongue tangling with hers while she still grins. She feels like she’s never going to stop giggling. She imagines this is how kids feel, when they get the one thing they’ve been begging for, like they’re going to burst from the joy of it. She has to stand up to get the leotard off her hips, and then she’s standing before him in pink tights that start up under her breasts and nothing else. He gets that soft, wanting look on his face, and she wants to see life and laughter there again. They can figure out what to do with the softer things later.

“You got a plan to get these off?” she asks.

“I’m a genius,” he assures her. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Doc,” she says, “Take your goddamned pants off.”

It would have been easier if he’d toed his shoes off first, but neither of them are much for linear thinking at the moment, and none of it does a damn thing to shore the edge of delicious hysteria they’re both riding, struck by so much to touch, to taste and explore.

And it turns out he does have a plan for stripping off the tights, turning her toward the bed and kneeling behind her as he draws them down, his mouth hot and wet and sweet along the backs of her calves, knees, her inner thighs, sliding her forward over the bed, tongue stroking into her, fingers deft and nimble, and so fucking good, as she clutches the edge of the mattress and breaks, muffling the sound of her orgasm with the coverlet.

He slides inside her from behind, full and thick, his hand underneath her belly, fingers moving against her slickness, mouth against her shoulder, and she reaches back to catch his neck, fingers tangled in his hair, leverage to thrust back against him. The slap of flesh, the slick sounds are heady, astonishing, and the thought that it’s him inside her, the realization of want matched with the physical sensation catches her like a wave.

She feels herself build again, surprised at the quick rebound of her response. She clutches around him, and gasps aloud as he answers by thrusting harder, biting and nipping at her neck, her name like a mantra. She catches her fingers in his distracted ones and uses his hand to bring herself over the edge again, as he goes nonverbal and comes with a harsh beautiful sound in her ear.

~*~

Compared to Natasha sparing with Clint--which is like a circus act breaking out into a hockey game--Natasha and Steve, whether training or dancing or taking down opponents, are a mongoose and snake.

Steve is wilier than you’d expect, working from a foundation of years without any real mass or stamina to speak of, his situational awareness and ability to take a fall and pop up elsewhere is surprising.

Natasha still tries to work him like a parkour ninja working a set of monkey bars, but this time Steve has honed the wrestling holds, arm locks and close quarters moves that subject him to a lot of potential damage in the short term, but by moving into it and utilizing his greater mass and leverage, give him a good chance of immobilizing her.

They’re down in an MMA style knot, Natasha’s face jammed against the mat, but she’s working her knee into a different angle that Steve hasn’t twigged on yet, when Tony walks in.

He’s wearing the Judas Priest _SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE_ t-shirt he’d tried to give Bruce after the second trip to Franklin Proving Ground, when the Other Guy had cleared a hillside while howling hard enough to drown out the rending of trees. Bruce had given it back after scraping off the S, so it now said _CREAMING FOR VENGEANCE_. “I see the kids are busy playing Twister.”

“Submission holds,” Bruce explains. Natasha gets the knee under herself and with an explosive shove flips Steve onto his back.

“Tap out.” Tony calls over, “You’re fucked. Just tap out, we’ll get some lunch.”

Steve counters by twisting to pin her neck down with his calf. Bruce has already seen that leaving her elbow unattended is a big mistake even with Steve wearing a cup. “Which one are you talking to?”

“Fuck if I know,” Tony shrugs. “Come on, there’s a mess of Chinese coming up the service elevator, I want to eat it hot.” He adds over his shoulder on the way out, “We’ll talk about strategy for the Esposito op.”

Natasha taps out with a hard smack to the mat.

“Yeah,” Steve untangles, and offers her a hand up, “I think we should.”

Natasha rolls to her own feet with a slow dignity, and the room holds its breath.

Tony turns, expectant.

“You promised me data security.”

“I _offered_ data security.” Tony counters. “I _took_ the liberty of bullshitting you.”

Bruce crosses his arms and just watches the odd communicative stare-down between them. It’s Tony who breaks it, pacing back to her.

“Listen, I know you planned to get the band back together one by one, but...we’re already warmed up and ready to rock.”

Natasha’s voice is smooth like a glassy sea, “This is not an Avengers op.” 

Tony closes the distance down to nearly chest-bumping, but his tone is soft and frank. “Isn’t it?”

“This is mine.”

“Those two things are not exclusive.” Tony lets the moment hang, and the only sign of his struggle to keep silent is a tightening under his eyes as he watches her analyze.

Natasha takes another step, deliberately challenging. Tony keeps still, like a dog with a biscuit on its nose, then like a spasm he blinks and flicks his eyebrows up, shrugging off the tension, “So call it, Romanoff.”

Natasha packs the challenging look away like folding up an umbrella, looks at Steve and then glances to Bruce, and finally sizes up Tony as she walks past him toward the door. “Then let’s jam.”

~*~

When she saw even Thor at the table, in civvies shoveling fried rice onto a plate, and realized that Stark really had assembled them like a goddamned board meeting, she was tempted to walk out. 

Clint had just crooked his insinuating eyebrow and held up his phone like she’d missed his call. She’d been making plans and getting off and practicing choke holds, and all this time Stark was mobilizing her resources against her.

She’s still angry. That there’s a small tinge of relief woven through the anger doesn’t make it better. Layers, she reminds herself, balance reaction against need. She does, and will, need help. Admitting it is humbling, but she’s learned that teamwork involves inter-dependency. But damn it, this was not Stark’s call to make--her secrets, her decision. 

She thinks of Bruce and the damned jeans. _“Sometimes its easier to accept things you don’t want from Tony than to tell him no.”_. But this isn’t a stealth makeover and a sincere if pushy effort to make Bruce take an interest in the outside world. It’s a power struggle over knowledge and control. She’s up for it.

Clint reaches over to steal the dumpling she just put on her plate. “I hate Texas.”

She raps him on the wrist with her chopsticks. “You’re not moving there.” She loads a plate with dumplings and tiny eggplants and gingered pork, and goes to sit by him. 

“Been busy?” he says. 

She shrugs. “Laying a foundation.”

Clint snorts, and she kicks him under the table.

“Trying to plan for the best possible outcome,” she concedes. “And it’s complicated.”

She doesn’t add that she’s pretty sure the only way to create a favorable outcome is to put herself into the middle of it like a bomb. Trip the trigger, and hope there are enough of the right kind people around to contain the fallout. 

While he tended toward grandstanding when he bothered to show at all, Stark actually did know how to run an effective meeting--Steve is up to speed on the whole file she’d released to Tony.

“Beloved junkyard dogs with guns,” he chides, “these are _children_ , Nat.”

“They’re children, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous...or that they’re going to be interested in being removed from the situation. My primary goal is to separate Kudrin from them, and then assess the damage. Find out what the best next step is for them.”

“Why not call in the Feds? Have them shut down the school?”

Clint steps in to explain, ostensibly to Steve but also the balance of the room. “While we can prove the original agencies lost track of these kids, they aren’t obligated to report to the Feds when they do, and Kudrin has been very careful with the paperwork on her end, so the harder we push the better she’ll look. At this point her paper trail is actually our best tool to identify these kids--guardian ad litem reports filed like clockwork with courts all over the country on about twenty of them so far.”

Natasha sums up, “If we succeed in discrediting the guardians, and remove the kids from Kudrin’s custody, at best they go back into the foster system. More likely it’ll be a free-for-all like we saw for SHIELD’s toys, only this time it’s enhanced children.” Another regime or rogue entity peeking inside their chromosomes, taking these kids apart for knowledge Natasha’s never been willing to let loose into the world.

“They will need guidance.” Thor doesn’t understand the legal complexities, but he’s dead certain about what he does know. “They have been given power, and they will need to learn how to wield it justly.”

“These girls have seen that there’s another life out there, I don’t want to limit their options again--I don’t think we can, in practice. I just want their options to be less lethal to the general population. I think they could do a lot of good, if we gave them a real chance.”

Natasha looks at Bruce, at Steve; they are a triad representing the best and worst of that type of experimentation. She’d really like to limit the fear and damage, give these kids the best shot at keeping their books in the black from the start.

“So there’s no one _to_ call,” Steve sighs, “no one to take responsibility.”

Natasha’s answer is succinct, “I’m the answer to that call.”

She also wants to rob Madame of any chance at manipulating anyone else ever again. Social Services isn’t even a balm, they’re a goddamned buffet if Madame walks free to start somewhere else.

“We.” Bruce says softly, looking at her, voice cutting through the noise in her head.

She focuses on him, and he vaguely gestures around the room.

“ _We_ are the answer.”

There’s a long pause, attention turning towards her from every quarter, turning her seat into the de facto head of the table.

“So,” Steve speaks first, “call it.”

~*~

Bruce leans his head against the wall. The table is strewn with the casualties of their war on Chinese food, and Stark tsks at the mess, hands on his hips like a fishwife, but he’s really just fussing and stalling.

Bruce is waiting him out, but he’s getting tired of waiting when he could be in his suite doing any number of other things with Natasha, so he gives Tony a little poke, “I’m just saying, I’d sleep lightly for awhile.”

“And you?” Tony refocuses in a flash, and Bruce knows he’s opened the right mystery box. “You’re comfortable closing your eyes around her?”

He thinks about their early run of putting the sleep into sleeping together. “I’m not the one she’s pissed at.” 

There’s a long silence, and Bruce lets a little frustration bleed into his tone, “Just ask the damn question, already.”

Tony stills, tossing the empty carton in his hand back onto the table. “Do you think this is a good idea?”

“Which part?”

“Any of it? You, sleeping with a genetically engineered spy who’s trying to take on a fucked up regime? Us, tangling with an old-school James Bond style villain. Killer kids, domestic fallout?”

“You called the meeting.” Bruce points out, “You could have let her run this alone.”

“But that’s it--she’s not alone, is she?”

“Are you…” Bruce laughs, struck by how familiar he’s become with the strange churlish affection Tony offers like a dare. “Tony, are you worried about _me_?”

“I think you’d do anything she asked you to.”

“Yes,” he says, with emphasis. “But she’s still learning to ask.”

“What if she gets good at it? What about _when_ she gets good at it?”

There’s no way to explain that their unspoken accord precludes that. The only things they’ve agreed to ask from each other are honesty and release, a good faith following through toward trust, toward tenderness. No more...but no less either. He simply shrugs, “I’ll count it as a win.”

~*~

Natasha heads out to the farm with Clint for a night, seeking some balance, a reminder of what she’s risking and why.

Eating dinner with the kids she recognizes that the easy overlapping of their conversations isn’t so different from dinner at the tower on a night when everyone is high on success and potential. Family there, too. Laura playfully smacks Clint’s ass as he clears the table and shepherds the kids to get cleaned up. Their version of normal, and it was hard fought, requiring distance and secrets.

Laura only knows that they’re prepping for something big and that she’ll need to keep the kids away from the news and the internet for awhile--or if she knows more, she’s better than Clint for keeping it close. She jostles Natasha’s arm as they’re washing dishes. “Clint told me that you’re taking a big risk, might not be around for awhile.” 

She nods. “It’s important. Old stuff that came back into play.”

Laura hands her a clean dish to be dried, looks at her shrewdly. “You look happy, Nat. I don’t...Clint only ever sees what he wants to see, but you look like your life is okay right now. So is it worth it, whatever this is? To risk that?”

Laura’s a smart woman. She knows that even successful missions have costs that are paid in sleepless nights, blood and guilt.

The answer isn’t that simple; she knows that her debts are bigger than her ability to ever adequately pay them back, but this mission is a chance for her to try, a chance she’s uniquely suited to take. That she has more to lose than just her life is...a new idea...something she doesn’t properly know how to factor in. She can’t assign it weight and balance her risk accordingly.

She offers the towel for Laura to dry her hands, then hangs it on the oven handle. “It’s what I have to do.”

Laura pulls her into a hug, which is uncharacteristic in length, and ends with her pushing Natasha away with a satirical sniff and self-reprimand, “Damn it, Laura, stop falling for spies!”

Later, when the kids have settled into sleep and Laura’s in the back den, drafting while a cooking competition show murmurs in the background, she goes out onto the front porch steps.

In the dark listening to the rustling by the trashcans and nursing a beer, she ponders the repeating cycle. There will always be raccoons after Clint’s cooking scraps. There will always be the sound of cicadas and the crisp taste of beer and Clint slipping through the screen door, until one day there is not.

He sits down on the edge of the porch, back to the banister and looks at her. She turns her head and salutes him with her bottle.

"You better not be figuring out how to say goodbye, Nat."

She shakes her head. She's not maudlin, she just needed to see in person the other part of the circle that's grounding her. "Just checking in," she says softly.

He waits, hesitating, then pushes on like what he wants to say is thornier than he'd like. "When you start factoring in what it looks like for the people you love, the people who love you...every time it gets harder. Needs to be worth it."

"You’re risking more than yourself." She gestures behind her. " I know that."

"I'm not sure you do, Nat.” He shakes his head, pensive. “ _You_ aren't in a vacuum anymore, either. You aren't someone's weapon or even just your own tool. You're not on the highwire alone anymore."

"That's awfully cryptic for you."

"You've built a life, a home. Not just here. I’m not saying don't do it. I'm saying, know the risk for what it is."

When she gets back the next morning, she sends out a missive and preps for tea with Fury. She’s still going to detonate like a bomb, but if anyone can help contain the fallout, it’s him.

~*~

It’s almost three in the morning. Natasha flops back against the pillow, feeling the cool empty space next to her; Bruce has been gone for awhile. She briefly considers going back to sleep. Neither of them are stellar at sleeping through the night, so she’s curious but not worried. Her plans are nearly in place, and she’ll be leaving soon. She wants all the time she can get.

She snags his shirt off the floor, empties the breast pocket of the receipt from breakfast, and buttons it, not bothering with anything else. At this hour anyone wandering the halls on these floors deserves what they get. His shirt is soft, smells like him, and she’s pretty sure that whatever he’s doing will become secondary to her in this and nothing else.

He’s in the lab, sitting in front of the computer at his workstation in pajama pants and a t-shirt, lit by the monitor and the desk lamp turned to illuminate the keyboard. She watches him for a minute, enjoying the depth of his concentration, before moving to stand by him.

He doesn’t look up until she’s right there, but his smile is rich and warm, and a bit apologetic.

“I had an idea,” he explains, “I didn’t want to forget it.”

She runs her fingers through his hair, shaking the top of his head a little. 

“Wake me next time,” she says. He nods, takes her in, and grins.

“You know, Steve has been known to be up at all hours too. If he sees you,” he says, wrapping a hand around her hip as she leans into him. “You’re going to traumatize him for life.”

“It’s unlikely that he’s never seen a naked woman in person, having toured with a theatre troupe,” she says thoughtfully, “Although I grant you, possibly not with intent.”

“He’d never be good for anything again.” His fingers slip under the hem to stroke along the crease of her thigh, confirming that she’s bare under the shirt.

“Good thing you’re made of sturdier stuff.”

“Growing sturdier.”

There’s a looping sequence running on his main screen, a modeled animation of DNA helices interacting. “What are you working on?”

The playfulness on his face is replaced by something more serious, reticent. He points to one rotating strand. “That’s your DNA.” He points to the other loop. “That’s mine.” 

“You’re putting them together?”

“Not exactly,” he pauses, and his voice is low. “The gamma radiation. It…I can’t…the only way to replicate my DNA is through blood. Meiosis sloughs off the mutations in the strain, but at the end of spermatogenesis there’s just...not enough left to code for a human being. This ends with me. Which is a relief.”

They were never going to make an army of curly-headed terrorists together. It was never going to be possible, on either side, and she’s not quite sure what the small wrench in her throat is when she thinks about that. She recognizes loss, even the source, but the hurt is still a surprise.

“So why the pas de deux?” she gestures at the screen.

“My blood cells carry the altered DNA profile, and it can cause those same mutations in others. That’s the theory, anyway. I don’t bleed much, thanks to him, but...I try to be careful. I wanted to make sure that any other...fluid transfer wouldn’t…”

He’s pensive, idly soothing his fingertips through the edge of her bush. She looks back at the screen. It’s dated the same day they went to Franklin for the first time.

She rests the side of her head against his. “Is that why you sent me to bed alone that night?”

“No,” he says, tightens his hold on her, hand spreading across her belly. “But I ran the test when you left. I’d been putting it off.”

“And?” 

He points out to her where the strains warp and weave. “What was done to you keeps you safe. I couldn’t give you a blood transfusion, but sex...I’m not putting you at risk.”

She rubs her cheek against his, faint rasp, and props her hip against his chair, leaning into him and slipping her hand under his t-shirt to lazily scratch his back. “And what would have happened,” she says, “if there’d been a risk?”

“Precautions, improvisation. More head.” He continues to look at the screen with her, cheek to cheek, but is also petting her with leisurely intent. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, but it...there wasn’t time. I could’ve made time.”

“So why tonight?”

“Something about the sequencing, the way your macrophages selectively hunt and rip apart the mutated cells I flooded it with. I think there may be something in that response that will help if something happens to you...we may be able to use it if we need to better understand what was done to those girls.”

She stops scratching. “Could you reprogram my DNA?” 

He pulls his cheek away from hers to look in her eye, shaking his head.. “No. I don’t think I could reprogram them either, if it’s anything related to the techniques used on you, but it might give us a sense of exactly what was done, and how it will effect them, offer us the chance to make small changes that would normalize them. Reset. Maybe, maybe not. Mostly, it just gives me a better understanding of how you’re different, what you can do.”

She straightens and turns his chair to face her, laying her hands on the sides of his neck and stroking her thumbs up along his jaw, off-balance and confounded.

She’s not sure that there’s ever been anyone who took such care with her. Clint saved her life, offered her friendship, family. Fury gave her a chance at redemption, resolution. Maria, Stark, Steve, Pepper and even Thor, they’ve offered her a community, a place to thrive.

This, though, this is a love letter. A mash note spelled out with only four letters, but telling her everything he can.

He smooths his hands up her back, drawn to make the connection by the look on her face, and kisses her. She unbuttons the shirt. 

“I have thoughts about what I can do,” she whispers, “to you, on that couch. I have something to prove about ballerinas.”

~*~

Natasha and Clint are solid in their plans, with just a quick text from him, “Let’s keep the abscess from rotting the brain.” She breaks the rest out into teams.

Bruce works with Pepper on assembling a medical team through the guise of the Maria Stark Foundation’s expanded interest in child welfare, including the psychological, therapeutic and legal skillsets they’ll need to re-integrate the student body of Lozen Academy.

The paperwork count is up to twenty-three. Clint has created subfolders for each of them in the file, a few of them only seem to exist in the regular reports filed by out of state guardians to their local courts, stating essentially that the child is doing very well at their boarding school placement.

She has Steve take point on interfacing with Hill and Fury; Maria’s a hub of inter-agency connections for ground support, and Fury’s understanding of all the players may be necessary for team cohesion when the shit hits the fan. Natasha hopes it doesn’t come to that, she wants to respect Nick’s stated desire to become a ghost, but the fact is, Nick’s chosen form of poltergeist has not been very stealth to begin with.

Tony and Thor seem to pair up on their own, which is disconcerting in part because she’s not sure what they’re working on, as their only updates to the file are Thor re-reading it and Tony correcting her spelling when her fingers typed out cognates from other languages or when she lets extra U’s slip into colour and behaviour.

Natasha is certain she’ll have the financing and the firepower, which is really all she requires from that quarter.

Bookending her days spent neck deep in intel, calls, analysis and strategy, her mornings and her evenings are a curious and astonishing blend of...she’s not even sure what this is, that she and Bruce have put together.

He sleeps deepest in the small hours of the morning, so she rolls out of his bed and heads to class. At some point he runs, and meets her afterward with tea from a place he’s found that has an Assam like rolling around in autumn leaves. They hold hands and catch up on the way back, and it’s conversation she doesn’t have to steer, because they can follow each other pretty well even when free-associating from topic to topic. The elevator ride is sixty floors of anticipation.

The sex is...unprecedented. For all his public reserve, once she gets Bruce naked he’s wanton and cheeky, tactile and hedonic. In general he’s prone to casual nudity in the confines of the suite. She finds herself joining him, just to have more opportunities for touch, reading in bed at night with his hand slowly stroking down her spine, her legs tangled with his as he coaxes her toward sleep.

His hand is resting on her back one morning after class as she’s unlocking his door, and she turns to look at him, and finds herself a little bit helpless in the face of his steady regard.

She tilts her head, trying to find the angle on what he’s thinking, but he just bends towards her, mouth against hers, and they stand in the hallway kissing with no other aim--because they can, because they have, for this moment, this luxury. Natasha’s stopped trying to compare this to past experience, accepting that she’s flying without a reference.

There is a warmth to her need for him, a sense of belonging that she’s not sure what to do with, so she doesn’t do anything. 

The only moments of conflict stem from her plan to go into Lozen Academy alone. His mouth gets flat and tight when she mentions it, so she doesn’t talk about it. It’s not worth tainting this time together, particularly if it’s all they’re going to get.

They don’t talk about that either.

Her own suite has become more a holding pen for clothes and shoes than a place she occupies. She doesn’t see the point in staying there at night. She chides Bruce for leaving his things on the floor, but is secretly glad that he’s allowing himself the messiness. That he’s making himself at home, even if she does end up kicking his socks over to his side of the bed for him to deal with. 

The last morning in New York she wakes with her head pillowed on his furry chest and his morning erection clutched in her hand. He sets aside the datapad he’d been reading too close, his glasses still on the side table. “Morning, sweetheart.”

“I overslept.”

“No, you woke up earlier.” He smooths the hair back from her temple, and she thinks he’s been doing that for a while now, idly petting her while she slept. “Then you rolled over, grabbed my dick like a teddy bear and fell asleep on me.”


	10. Chapter 10

Natasha’s goodbyes are practical, reviewing final strategic details with each of her team, handing off her laundry list of items of care. She knows that follow through is a given, and that it still might not make a difference.

Steve should be easy, he’s so meticulous he knows the details as well as she does, but it’s surprisingly awkward as they feed the ducks in the park. He’s still smarting a little from being brought in last.

“We’re a team,” he says finally, having fed all of his corn immediately to the prettiest and pushiest of the mallards.

“You aren’t always comfortable with moral compromise,” she explains, “and I didn’t know, still don’t know, how grey this will go. Plus, when it seemed like five girls and a farmhouse, I didn’t think I was going to need a full suite of talent.”

“But you’ve known for awhile that it was bigger.” He frowns at his hands, interlaced in his lap. “It got to the point where Tony felt it was unfair.”

She thinks about this. “Giving orders and asking for resources are different things without a hierarchy in play. I’ve only ever been alone, or part of a far more intricate system. I’m still making mistakes. My original plan had been to go in alone, triage along the way.”

It doesn’t hurt her to admit this, though she hears Steve wince.

“That’s not a plan,” he says, “that’s a Hail Mary, a sacrifice play.”

She shrugs. “I do think this is better, but it’s still...an unknown. I’ve dumped everything I can think of into the file, tagged and categorized and mapped out contingencies. It’s a plan now. But once I go dark, they’ll need your expertise. They’ll need to follow your orders. You know that.” 

Steve nods, reluctant but there’s no place in their world for false modesty.

“If I can get any further intel out, I will. But Steve, protocols...we practiced for a reason. I need you to make sure no one gets hurt if it’s possible to prevent it.”

He turns to look straight at her, hard and sharp. “And are you including yourself in that assessment? Or is this gonna be another swing at potential disaster?”

“That worked out okay,” she says with false bravado, but feels oddly cold inside. This idea of her existence, or demise, weighing into strategic decisions is gnawing at her. She needs to shove it aside. She gives Steve the rest of her corn to feed to the ducks.

~*~

This time it’s Bulgarian. Nick has ordered a dark wine, astringent with tannins, and paired it with a plate of bread and pickled vegetables, olives and chutney and cheese. Natasha’s not hungry. 

She hands him a small drive. It’s a backup of everything Bruce has put together about the way her system was altered, speculation on potential uses and potential neutralizers depending on the number of injections, the length of time subjected, the types of potential psychological alterations. But it’s just that, speculation.

Nick already knows the outline of the plan from Steve and Hill, including how the others come into play. While she’s confident in her team and her choices, there’s something about the way he coasts between grave and smug as they talk around the issue--as if he’d engineered the whole thing to get her to ace her exit exams---that she finds both deeply irritating and comforting.

But there’s a final piece she needs to give him, that she needed to do in person. She’s also using it as a practice run for another, more edged discussion when she gets home.

“When I go in,” she begins, “Kudrin will expect penance. She’ll gloat, act unsurprised like she expected this all along, but she’s going to require proof of loyalty.”

She lays out her theory like any extrapolated intel. “The other side to the Red Room was interrogations, and I’m sure she’s been innovating on that front as well.” 

He thoughtfully tears bites from the roll on his plate. “Sort of your speciality, though, isn’t it?”

“My skillset was bred with Kudrin.” She shrugs. “I can avoid a number of topics and questions; I know how to keep my secrets close. But my mission, at bottom, is to provide an exit strategy for the students.”

“I know sometimes you don’t process things you don’t want to hear, so I’ll indulge you and repeat myself.” Nick sets down his roll and turns his whole focus on her. “My only regret about trusting you is that I didn’t do it sooner. That hasn’t changed.”

Natasha feels she has to say it, lay it out clear, “Getting those kids out is my highest priority. Containment is secondary.”

“Still doesn’t change it.” Nick leisurely drags a piece of bread through the chutney as he lounges back. “You want to lay another one on me? I could do this all day, if you’re in the mood to keep stalling.”

~*~

She’s got a small bag of clothes and toiletries, hastily packed items that say she’s walking in penitent and leaving the trappings of this other life behind. She assumes the bag will be searched. She’s just reviewing her steps.

The conversation with Nick had left her with a renewed focus and an equal sense of dread, and she’s inexplicably...angry. At herself, at Fury, at Madame. At Steve for calling her out. At Bruce for making her want to stay behind.

Bruce comes into her suite and knocks on her bedroom door as she drops the closed bag to the floor, but he doesn’t wait for her response. He goes to sit on the bed which hasn’t been slept in for weeks. 

She’s laid out pieces of herself like a puzzle for them both to put together, and she can’t figure out how to square that with her choice to walk into a situation that’s bound to scatter them back apart. All her intentions to rehash her earlier conversation with Fury, about the interrogations and penance, vanish.

They’d argued briefly that morning, finally, pointlessly, about her going alone. That wasn’t up for debate, and she didn’t like it either, and even he knew that. But she knows it still bites at him, and she can’t take that feeling with her. She can’t have remorse stinging her like a bruise when she needs to focus.

She needs to unpack her sense of self before she sees Madame, has to go into the situation as an alternate version of Natasha. One that never grew entwined with Barton’s family, never found a mentor or friends, never pushed past her sense of safety and survival to risk herself for something bigger. Never stripped herself down in the face of someone else’s regard, or built herself back up whole to do better, be better for that person, for herself.

Was never someone loved. 

She can’t face walking away if what she’s taking with her is that morning of sleepy, yearning tenderness and worst case scenarios. They keep talking strategy, but they haven’t talked about the reality of her not coming back, what that would mean for him. 

She’s made him watch her grapple and punch with Steve, building up his resistance to seeing her at risk, but also wanting to demonstrate strength, reassure him. But she can’t talk about stepping back into Madame’s world and her own past with the same promise of acceptable risk. It’s a lie to say she can guarantee her own security and she can see on his face that he knows it, and that he’s angry too.

They’ve been whistling past the graveyard and now she’s at the gate.

Having something to lose doesn’t feel noble or powerful, it feels bitter, and it tastes like ash. It hurts enough to leave her gasping. She wants to lash out at something, and he’s there, mirroring her need, searching her face and trying to connect.

He reaches for her hand, pressing a kiss into her palm and she snaps, weary that all the tenderness and care in the world won't make a difference if she fails.

She shoves him back on the bed.

He catches her mood, and she can see the brightness of his own anger flaring. Knows it’s dangerous, and doesn’t care. She wants to tear them both open, find space where it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t feel like sacrifice.

She sets her knee on the bed and he sits up quickly, grabbing her arm and hauling her towards him, using his body weight to roll her under him.

He's never going to win with skill and tactics in a physical match against her, but she can tell by the look on his face that he’s betting she’ll only push this so far. He's wrong. She grabs his hair, bites at his collarbone, and he pushes back, shaking her down into the mattress a little, pressing his hips into the cradle of her legs and digging in as she wraps her ankle around his, tries to flip him back, knee too close to his groin for comfort. She grinds against him, wanting to fight, wanting him hard inside her.

He grabs her wrists, slams them down by her ears.

"Stop it."

She bucks up her hips, freeing one arm to hook him around the neck, nails and strength and pain.

He's surging towards that fine line now, she can see his pupils contract. Desire and rage, multiple conflicting inputs that are hard enough to parse on his own and now he's feeding off her as she grapples. Provocation, then. Maybe solution. She nips at his jaw, scraping stubble with her teeth, and thrusts up against him, whimpering.

She feels him give in, give up the dangerous edge of the rage, finding one track to channel it all. He kisses her so viciously she tastes blood, and she makes a noise that feels and sounds like relief to them both.

The desperation ricochets back and forth, sharp and staticky and raw--as searing and sure as the joy and lust that usually fires between them.

He bites the side of her neck hard enough to hurt, glasses jabbing her ear. She moans, her hands under his shirt scratching deep grooves in his back. Thrusting against him.

He's hard and she fumbles between them, frees him, wriggles out of her pants, and he grabs her, shoving her knee over his shoulder. She's limber but he clearly doesn't care if it hurts her, his fingers marking her thigh as he grips tightly. Her hand wraps around him, hot and tight, and guides him home. He slams into her, no finesse, just brutal, bruising slap of flesh that she can feel in every cell.

It’s exactly what she needs, down to the fierce set of his mouth, teeth on edge.

She wants to mark him, keep a piece of him, rub herself deep into his skin so he can't sleep from wanting, carrying her into the world with the evidence of her need. It's selfish and aching, and she pushes, working herself as he drives into her, fucking him back just as roughly until he comes, her name low and harsh, and so wanting that she gasps, her own release startling. It washes away the taste of rage and loss, leaving her boneless and breathless.

He collapses on her, and she slides her fingers into his hair, skimming his glasses off and tossing them back farther on the bed. He kisses her neck, stroking his hand along her arm, softening and sliding out, rolling off her but maintaining contact, legs tangled with hers, regaining breath and equilibrium. He’s still mostly dressed.

"Well, you should be more than ready to go fight with Tony next," he says, one hand over his eyes, the other hot on her hip.

"This wasn't a fight."

"The hell it wasn't."

He waits for her to suss things out, but his voice lacks the kindness it normally holds when leading her to an emotional conclusion that he’s arrived at first.

“I will be there. We will be there. Three days. And this isn’t a goodbye. Even after… this, I still want you to come home. Fuck, maybe because of this.”

He moves his hand off his eyes, and rolls to face her. “I will always want you to come home.”

“Four days,” 

“Three days and we will be there for extraction. Four days and you’ll be back here. Promise me.”

She sits up to look at him, his clothes awry and his arm stretched out and tucked underneath her pillow. The hollow look to his face, the edge of a welt rising around his side, the curve of his mouth, the line of his throat, the pattern of hair framed by his open shirt and pants are small things she stows away.

She leans down and kisses the bare edge of his hip bone, kisses the mark she’s left on his neck, and finds her pants.

She’s left him a burner phone in their room, and a laundry list of things she wants to do when she comes back. It’s the closest thing she can get to a promise without risking a lie.

~*~

Bruce joins Pepper in the conversation pit before the panoramic windows. She’s working on a tablet and laptop simultaneously, with a news channel on mute on the big screen. Sixty floors below, it’s about to go down.

“Can I ask a favor?” He takes a seat kitty-corner to her, his back to the screen. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but...I can’t watch, but I can’t _not_ watch...would you mind if I just watched you?”

“While I monitor the coverage.” Pepper clarifies, and he’s relieved to hear an indulgent kindness in her dry tone. “You want to see my full suite of ‘ _Oh, Tony, no_ ’ faces.”

He crosses his arms tight, wallowing a little in the sting across his back. “Why not learn at the feet of a master?”

~*~

The argument is vicious and public.

_“Why would I come back? Even with all the blowback from dumping the SHIELD database, the Senate subcommittees, I’m still obscure enough to get by. I’m known best by the kind of people I used to work, but I’m more than a field agent, and I’ve got a life here. So I need a reason to walk away from it.”_

Tony and Natasha work it like a cutthroat tango, potshots across the bow for a week beforehand like hot glances across a room before the music starts. The widow hashtag becomes a seine net hauling up the chthonic sexist id of the internet, while Anonymous starts targeting Stark personally as a guy looking to transplant Russian oligarchy in American soil.

_“Sure I run my mouth off, but I can barely keep track of the ten things I’m usually thinking of, much less adding in a layer of pure confabulation.”_

_“Then don’t. Just cut loose with every horrible thing you’ve ever thought about me, even in passing. Trust in my ability to push your buttons.”_

It culminates in a swift violent confrontation on the street in front of Stark tower, the physical altercation Tony’s always been half terrified of and half itching for since she’d casually slammed Happy onto the mat years ago. He gets right in her face, eyes wet black like ink, sneer as razor sharp as the racing stripes off his goatee.

She shoves him, bellowing in Russian profanity the things she wants Madame to be thinking about her when she arrives in Denton, peripherally aware of the phones that had swung their way.

Tony bounces back like a rooster, chest first and feathers ruffled, and shoves her harder. She grabs the screaming eagle on his t-shirt to detain him in the path of her fist, and gets three solid punches in before bystanders pull them apart.

_“Pretend you’re launching me like a missile.”_

_“I hand-delivered the last one.”_

_“I’m hoping for a similar end result.”_

Stark releases a statement the next day citing differences of opinion, and insinuating that charges would not be filed due to concerns that Ms. Romanoff was already dealing with many personal issues. Natasha had bought a plane ticket within the hour after throwing the first punch, Tony’s blood still visible in the creases of her knuckles. 

~*~

Natasha had spent hours circling back to the question of how she would present herself to Madame, but deep down she thinks she always knew. She has let her hair dry into its natural curl, just a little something smoothed in to combat the humidity. She wears dark jeans, sturdy boots and a white button-down, with no jewelry and minimal makeup. She has not covered her recent crop of scars, though her sleeves are rolled up past the elbow.

Natasha parks her rental car in a guest spot of the staff lot. She passes the track, a team of middle-schoolers running hurdles, and circles to the front of the building.

Wide steps lead up to the main doors, framed by two storeys of galleries. Three young women about seventeen are talking in a group in the upper left gallery; they express no outright interest, but Natasha can tell they’re tracking her by the way their conversation becomes deliberately oblivious. She mounts the steps, and a child about twelve, possibly a small fourteen, opens the door with the ambassadorial aplomb of a Manhattan doorman.

“Thank you.”

“Madame will see you in her office,” the voice pipes sweet and clear, and the child steps lightly through a small atrium to lead her down the main corridor. Natasha has to viciously tamp down the twitch in her chest at the recollection. Comportment, Natashenka--how can you dance with such precision and then swagger like a man?

The door to Madame’s office is bookended by floor length windows, framed with heavy dark blue curtains tied back with cream silk ropes.

The child raps on the door, swift tiny knuckles, then sweeps it open for Natasha.

Madame stands, in a classically draped dress and tailored jacket, in the center of the room in front of her desk. To one side, a chesterfield and two wingback chairs mark out a conversation space, to the other side a massive samovar reigns over a small spread of fruits and pastries on a sideboard. The array of drapes behind Madame have been tied back to show the flat sweep of the grounds. Two girls about fourteen are in what would normally be a soccer field, taking turns flipping a tractor tire.

“Thank you, Trinh.”

The door closes behind Natasha.

Madame, Dr. Lyudmila Kudrin, steps forward. She’s over a century old at this point, betrayed only by the silver of her hair, a delicacy to her skin, and the long view she is undoubtedly taking with the deliberate variety of children she has collected. Where else but America could she be so spoilt for choice?

Madame takes Natasha’s hand in her own, asking, “Am I to bring forth the fatted calf?”

Natasha sinks down onto her knees, a supplicant on the edge of the expensive handwoven carpet,and looks up into the woman’s eyes. “I know who I am,” she turns Madame’s hand and presses a kiss of fealty, “and where I belong.”

~*~

Pepper comes up to the lab under the guise of finalizing the medical piece. Legal has filed the paperwork allowing the foundation to offer financial assistance to these children if need be, and she briefly shares with him the logistics, confirming it for herself. They could have handled this by email, but it’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t want to spar or poke, just wants to check in and share some reassurance. They all have something to lose.

He loses sight at times, for all his own complex back and forth with Tony, that Pepper is left to process the fallout of Tony’s actions across a broad spectrum of activities both personal and professional. It can be easy to overlook, since she often transforms them into something graceful while maintaining her own sense of self, as if spinning his flax into gold is a hobby.

She’d agreed to help finance this mission before Tony was brought onboard, a different type of sign off than Stark’s. He wonders what her own analysis is, but he’s too weary to ask, to bring it up when they’re both looking for distraction from a long, complicated day of logistical negotiations.

Bruce rubs at his eyes, not sure if its lack of sleep or the waning effectiveness of his prescription making things seem blurry. He’s not a guy for politics, mostly just felt buffeted by the back and forth around him while he harbored a tightening knot of worry and tried not to growl at anyone.

Hill has been handling interagency cooperation, a delicate and complex maneuver that seemed fine the day before, but putting Stark in the middle of anything that had the word “agency” in it had a gasoline on the fire kind of effect.

Today’s goal had been making sure that the foundation of accord Natasha had laid out wasn’t broken by the publicity of their fight going viral, containing the frustration of a bunch of paranoid bureaucracies wanting to distance themselves, keeping it from trickling down through everything and leaving a sour edge to the operational support on the ground. 

The government factions were already twitchy. Stark implying that they were incompetent while sporting a bandage on his cheek and half his sclera bruised the color of his mulberry tie and pocket square didn’t exactly foster fellow feeling.

“No one ever told Tony that he wasn’t the center of the universe,” Pepper says. “I’m not sure he realizes it even now.”

“At least this universe.” Bruce chuckles, secretly glad he’s not in that part of the multiverse. “Tony has a hard time imagining that anyone else’s choices are as valid as his version of what they should do.”

“He comes around,” she pulls a stool over to sit, “with proper persuasion. Eventually he can understand the word no.”

“Once he’s convinced you really mean it.” Bruce agrees. Stark and Natasha had that in common, that blank deliberate incomprehension at the word when they don’t want to hear it, the immediate work-around to angle it from the other side.

“I think,” Pepper begins, smoothing the stack of paperwork before her, “that he’s trying to make sure he’s giving her the support she needs, that all of you will need. He defaults to doing something even when he should leave well enough alone. He pokes when he worries, when he wants to touch base.”

“Sometimes literally, I know. It’s just that when he gets going, sometimes he sounds like he’s calling everyone an asshole, even when he’s really trying to play nice.”

Pepper shrugs, an impish fondness stealing over her features making her look a little like an evil elf. “Sometimes I admire that he doesn’t have to try to sound nice while being an asshole. Maybe envy.”

Bruce barks out a laugh.

~*~

Neither woman steps out of the performance, and wherever they come across students Madame introduces Natasha as, “My first and best pupil! She’ll be joining our staff...”

The sound of Madame’s voice addressing the children starts an alternate track running in Natasha’s head, emphasizing the flashes of recognition amid the Texas humidity. Young women throwing themselves at each task before them with raw ambition, grabbing the opportunity of this training like a life preserver. The well-scrubbed faces of children bent to their studies but blank of any expression of curiosity or play.

“You see how our pedagogy has advanced significantly since your time…”

There is hard physical conditioning, and briskly paced class work, and the dining hall is set with round tables and formal place settings. The studio is immense, having been the chapel originally. There are mats and gymnastics rings and a barre along the mirrored wall, but the studio is quiet save for the silky hiss of four children moving bo staves through katas under the direction of an old man seemingly made of rubber-bands and disapproval.

“...our success rate is not as good as I would like, but it is double that of the pilot program you were a part of.”

Natasha wonders how Madame is defining success. Recruitment versus completion? Effectiveness in the field? Simple survival? How many have come here for how long; how many never left? How many have? “I’m very impressed. You’ve done a lot of work here in a short time.”

“Yes.” Madame acknowledges this with an offhand nod, and shows her the dorm rooms in the east wing. They are sparsely furnished with two beds, desks and wardrobes, and exhibit a uniform obsessive neatness that disturbs Natasha greatly considering the wide range of backgrounds and ages.

Natasha estimates a staff of around ten, and perhaps forty children. If this were a real school it would be a walk in the park to secure and vacate, but setting aside the student teacher ratio being ready-made for hostages, the high likelihood of more extensive and defensible facilities underground (there is no shooting range visible, and the nurse’s office is a cursory showpiece), the children themselves are all wildcards.

It’s clear the children have been enhanced. Natasha remembers the first set of injections, the way Rosha had screamed the whole night while Elya had simply flushed beet red and died. She does not think Madame adds this factor when calculating her success rate.

“There will be time to catch you up with the curriculum.” Madame wraps Natasha’s hand over her forearm and strolls back down the staircase to her office on the main floor. “I think now we should speak more specifically about the unique contribution you could offer the girls.”

Madame has had equipment brought into her office, and the heavy drapes have been closed. “I want you to consider the value you bring.”

Natasha goes to the sideboard, putting together a plate of nibbles on autopilot, pouring a cup of pure strong zavarka from the little top pot. She adds sugar cubes with the silver tongs and rock steady hands, and when she stirs her tea, the spoon makes no noise in the cup.

“You see what I have built here is not the Red Room. It is better: the life I am giving these young women, the opportunity to change the world, to steer and direct the course of history. Not for one superpower to poke at the other like kids punching faces at the playground, but as a check on all of them.”

“A needed check.” Natasha flashes on Stark rotating a wire-frame model of a stealth satellite full of war robot, but she only mines it for the feeling of distrust, setting aside the concern itself for another day.

“Yes,” Madame offers approval like a gift. “A necessary corrective, intelligently applied.”

Natasha inspects the equipment, which is a theta-wave inducer.

“A blank slate, a set of paper dolls--these are blunt tools. I choose to guide, to direct, but I need them to become as subtle and glorious as you have. You broke the heavy conditioning. You walked away and then became full-fledged, and you still fight like you have nothing to lose. I want to know how you did this.”

This is the price of admission.

“Resiliency, Natalia.”

She runs her hand along the nondescript plastic case, the lead wires labeled and set out in a fan, ready.

“All of the things I give these girls, but sometimes, they become brittle no matter how hard I try. You are tempered like a sword. I want to know how.”

The one that got away. Natasha has always had a personal interest in understanding the myriad ways of changing someone’s mind, and she knows that a theta-inducer is small potatoes compared to a full memory suppression suite. But it’s a big building, and despite Madame’s professed philosophical shift, this could be like putting her own self under anaesthesia in pre-op.

“Do you even know how you did this thing, Natashenka?” Madame stands and gently directs Natasha to take her own seat, high-backed and warm, and positioned to view the sweeping corridor and the grounds when the drapes are not drawn tight. Madame implies an offering of what she thinks Natasha wants, control of the school.

“I will be back. I will let you think about this. You know your own mind, after all.”

Natasha drinks her tea, her plate still untouched at the sideboard. 

She sets down the cup. Be here now.

She methodically dismantles childhood associations from what she sees now. She was never really a child under Madame’s tutelage. She was never Lila, learning to use a T-square at the kitchen table with Laura, one hand guiding the smaller one to tilt the pencil just so along the edge. Twice now, Cooper has quietly called from just the other side of Natasha’s door at night, terrified of nightmares and unwilling to go even a few steps farther down the hall to his parents room. The second time, Natasha knew to simply tuck him in next to her and let him tell her about the monsters until he slowed into sleep. She didn’t sleep either night. She kept watch, overheated by the small furnace of his body nestled in the circle of her arm.

She was raised, so very carefully, but she was never cared for.

Natasha can see now, in this boarding school of children she remembers being, that these kids have no say in the matter. That even thriving here is only a decision to survive. That maybe the first real choice she made in her life was not breaking the conditioning in the first place, but years later when she stood before Fury and took the option where she could begin to redress her debts.

She draws careful fingertips along her bottom lids, using the moisture to smooth the ends of the curls around her face.

The theme is the same because Madame has only become more true to her own vision, but Natasha needs to know the variations at play here beyond the added athletics and the rebranding.

She needs to know what these kids have been through here. Because Madame is right, Natasha was the only one to ever walk away on her own steam, and at the time she was wounded and making a path through the dark. She needs to retrace that path so she can lead these kids not just out, but _back_.

When she comes back and Natasha offers herself up, Madame’s smile is the first genuine one Natasha thinks she’s ever seen.

Madame starts the line herself, taping it down against Natasha’s skin with something that Natasha would once have mistaken for fondness, but now sees is proprietary. She’s been settled onto the chesterfield, Madame indulgently letting her keep her boots on and laying a brocade throw pillow under her head, and another under her knees.

Natasha feels the chill in her vein as the drip begins to run, and she centers herself in preparation for the shift of however her state will be altered.

She’s done interrogation under the influence many times: heart pounding, sick and confused, half-asleep, distorted so far from normality it was hard to keep track of her body much less her mouth--but she’d had to train deeper than any SHIELD agent just to keep track of herself that first time she resisted the memory wipe and came through the other side, mostly intact.

“Are you recording?”

Madame does not answer, which in this case means yes.

Natasha had always wondered if Madame ever realized that she’d broken the conditioning for almost a year before she left, that it had taken Natasha all those months to hoard enough personal recall and information to even think there was anything for her outside of the Red Room in the first place.

She knows now that Madame had underestimated the slow building rebellion that Natasha had tended in her heart like an ember.

She underestimates it even now, as her fingers work through Natasha’s hair to locate landmarks on her skull, preparing and placing electrodes. “I will not chide you for your wandering. You know now that I was right, and that will be enough between us. Perhaps it was fun, running with the men like a stray dog in the street, before they turned on you, but now you are here, and we will get on with our work.”

“I’d like that very much, Madame.”

Natasha lets her tilt and angle her head, watching a bank of dark cloud roll in from the west. She does not expect to lie at all--not about the things Madame intends to ask her--but she will have to perform enough resistance to give the truth the patina of authenticity.


	11. Chapter 11

A few years back Maria had voted in person back at her old middle school. She was still registered through her parents' address, in a swing state with generous absentee balloting, and since she moved so often and deployed so chaotically, she missed less elections that way. Days later she tried all through lunch to impress on Natasha the surreality of it.

_"They shrank the halls, I'm certain of it. Everything looked scaled down 25%."_

_"You've grown since then."_

_"I was this height at thirteen." Maria shook her head, wry, "Maybe I got bigger on the inside."_

Natasha is not in the commissary with Maria, but laid out on a couch with the familiar voice of Madame lulling in her ears. She does feel bigger on the inside, the voice doesn’t take up nearly as much space in her head as it used to.

Madame is still pretending that she is here willingly, offering herself up to come back into the fold--looking to share power and perhaps take over--and so the only thing tying Natasha to this sofa is her own will and the weakness from whatever she was dosed with.

She can't focus her eyes, and from the physical taste of this altered state she suspects Scopolamine, a classic but hard to get these days. Despite the addition of the theta-inducer, Madame is leaning on an old friend, a favorite spoon to stir this pot. 

"I should learn some new recipes," Natasha hears herself say, "I really only have the one, and even I'm sick of it."

"Natashenka, focus now."

"How," Natasha hears the fear in her own voice before it blooms in the pit of her stomach, "how did I get back here?"

"You will tell me this in time," Madame brings the inducer up, "but first I wish to know how you left in the first place."

~*~

Barton shows up in just enough time to make their plane. The near miss sets Bruce’s teeth on edge. He’s already hating the idea of putting himself in a big metal tube, and Steve always acts like each flight is dropping them directly into the heart of Germany, so really, he’s no help.

Barton’s got some sort of food on his shirt. “Long day, man,” he says, with a sigh. “Long day. Plus, they say it’s tornado weather. I fucking hate Texas.”

~*~

She remembers that very first time, memory flashing through, horrifying. The gun a solid weight in her hand, the trigger a perfect response to the question being asked. Blood misting hot over her face. She’s not repulsed by the gore, but by the distance--it feels like she’s watching it on a screen. It futzes in and out. 

Every time they wipe her memory, it resets to that moment.

She hands the gun to Madame, and someone hoses down the room. She strips her clothes off, washes her face. “Sloppy, Natashenka, but accurate. Next time, less mess.”

It morphs into a Soviet era hotel room, gilt-edged mirrors and gaudy rose walls and upholstery. She’s wearing white, the man flat on his back, the blood pooling out away from her. She’s perfectly clean to the trailing hem of her gown. She thinks he’s got a name, that she knows it. She’s equally sure it doesn’t matter, but it’s so close, on the tip of her tongue.

It’s trying to fish his name from the depth of memory that puts the first fissure in the conditioning, starts the cracks that will bring it down.

One bullet. One name. All of that blood, maroon clashing with the rouge of the room. She’s not concerned with why, not then. Just needs to scratch the itch of the unknown.

A voice, and the rose walls recede. Madame doesn’t look pleased, and Natasha wants to roll over, curl into herself. She tries to keep her composure, despite her wet face, snot and tears and overstimulated adrenals. She’s determined not to puke, but knows she’s already hyperventilating trying to stay atop the nausea. She sits up slowly, and Madame hands her a towel. Her eyes are bright.

“I didn’t expect that regret would be what set you free.”

She looks up with clear eyes, disconcerted that Madame is failing to understand what to Natasha is no longer a subtle nuance, disquiet versus remorse. “It was never about regret.”

Dinner that night with the girls is a low cacophony of light chatter. She eats with Madame and the other members of the senior faculty, sussing them out. Not enhanced themselves, perhaps some of them not even fully aware of that piece, but everyone on campus is complicit on some level. The majority seem mercenary, which is what they’ve speculated, but for at least one woman, who ostensibly teaches Latin, Logic and a smattering of other subjects, there’s a dark fascination with pain, the opposite of compassion.

When it goes down that one will need to be removed quickly, as she’s likely to make it ugly just for the sport of it.

Three days. She just needs to make it for three days; at best a couple hours of fitful sleep in the small hours before the next day of classes and interrogation and playing the part of the prodigal. Two more chances to look back at her past, keep her secrets close, try to gain enough intel and maybe build some social capital to be able to lead these girls into a new life.

A memory wipe is a storm to weather. Madame’s new method is subtler, softer, far more persistent, and Natasha can see how it could erode as devastatingly as water. 

The older girls have had multiple sessions of it, chronic like an injury not allowed to heal. There’s a look in their eyes that she recognizes; she’s used to seeing it in the mirror.

Natasha rolls her neck. The muscular twitches from the theta-wave inducer leave her achy and uncomfortable. She thinks of submission holds and non-lethal attacks and exit points in a casual way so she won’t think about how fucking much she wants to crawl into a warm, soft bed and not talk about her day while Bruce reads and pretends he doesn’t need new glasses, and rubs the back of her neck, slow strokes along her spine.

~*~

On the airfield in Denton there’s a woman with a handwritten sign saying, “Lozen Family Reunion”. Her iron grey hair is back in a ponytail and she’s wearing Dickies and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a tank top underneath. She looks like she could give Clint a good run at arm-wrestling, but he smiles as soon as he deplanes, striding over and clasping her hand in a robust shake that includes a mutual back pat.

“This is going to be an inter-agency clusterfuck, Ren.”

“Aren’t they all, these days?”

Clint starts to introduce her to the members of the team she hasn’t met yet, but this is a formality since Renata’s done her homework and she has a question or comment for each of them. When she shakes Bruce’s hand he catches a flash of her concealed carry holster under her work shirt, and he reflects that this doesn’t really alter her sensible weathered rancher look.

Before he can offer a greeting she pulls him close by the grip and says, “Loved your cow-punching in New York, by the way.” She pats his shoulder once, rather firm, and continues aloud, “I’ll introduce you to the med team when we get to tactical HQ.”

It’s a lie to say that he’s getting used to the way some LEO and military types can express admiration for the rage monster thing, as if he’s got a trained attack dog heeling him dutifully, instead of it being Bruce himself going unhinged and uncontrollable, raw pain and destruction made manifest.

He’s getting to the point where it no longer makes him want to crawl into a hole and die.

~*~

Under the guise of growing more familiar with the campus, Natasha walks the perimeter with two of the middle schoolers as guides. It’s the first time she’s been unchaperoned by faculty, but it’s also well away from anything Madame sees as vital or sensitive.

The girls are chatty in a way that gives her hope, though they have learned to be careful about the topics they discuss.

There’s a frizzed quality to the grass in patches that suggest electrostatic issues. The crinkled edges look like thin sweeps from a protractor. Some sort of barrier then, an extra layer of security. Depending on the complexity of the system, that’s going to be essential info to pass along.

Afterward she sits in on two of the training sessions for the mixed ages. The girls exhibit familiar discipline. They work in sync, when necessary, the younger ones still playful, but practiced. The older ones face off, and she evaluates their performance.

One of the young women, heavy black hair knotted low on her neck, seems to be making a show of not pulling her punches for sparring. This is good form--why instill a non-lethal reflex?--but in doing so she’s also taking more damage than necessary. Natasha gives the correction, and there’s a feral challenge in the young woman’s eyes as she comes to the edge of the mat. 

“Madame has told us that you’re skilled.” she says. “Perhaps you should show us. I’m sure we have a lot to learn.”

Natasha’s pleased, actually; a chance to burn off some of her energy and nerves.

The young woman is tall, a cockier Bobbi with a reach like the hand of fate. Natasha notices that many of the other girls look at the young woman like she’s their champion, though not all. Natasha thinks that the trick isn’t going to be not hurting her, but teaching her about failure in a way that saves face for both of them in front of the school.

Natasha lets her complete a throw, rolls through a pin, and lets the young woman get in a solid two punches. She gets more confident, starts to try for fancy when she should be shooting for efficient, a choice that results in her slammed to the ground five seconds later as Natasha pins her neck.

‘It’s not about beating your opponent,” she says softly to the young woman, for her ears only. “The only thing you ever prove is by walking away.”

The young woman springs back up, angry, ready to fight, lashing out with a vicious round house that misses by millimeters. Natasha knocks her down again with a quick sweep to her feet. “What’s your name?”

The young woman is furious, high spots of color on her cheeks. Then, surprisingly, she packs it away, clearing her eyes and standing up so she can study Natasha in turn. “Ameena.”

“There’s always a good reason to not get hurt,” she says. “Find the reason, Ameena. Make it hurt less.”

~*~

Maria Hill is hovering over Steve at one of the tactical stations set up in the mobile HQ, crowding him a little as he frowns at the screen. Steve had mentioned offhand that she was teaching him Spanish, guileless and sincere, but Bruce suspects something more in the way Hill’s forearm rests easily on his shoulder as they read. They are both pedantically precise tacticians, sharp and quick, and inter-agency cooperation aside, Maria’s too busy to simply tutor.

Getting Rogers laid would take the focus off Bruce’s own sex life as well--some kid from accounting had shared the elevator with him down to the lobby the day he left New York, looked pointedly at the bite on his neck when the doors opened, and saluted him.

Steve’s eyes flick up to Bruce and any idle speculation about a budding romance are soured by what Tony refers to as the Power Frown.

Steve deploys a standard subtle sarcasm mixed with pissy disapproval regardless of what’s offending him: could be he got incorrect change, could be the end of the world. It’s one of the things Bruce likes most about him, a kind of detachment that retains the right to judge and find wanting. The downside is that it gives little indication of scale.

Steve explains, "She should have checked in by now."

Hill shakes her head, scrolling through the specs on Lozen Academy that Natasha had fleshed out in excruciatingly particular detail. "Only one server, two ISPs and incredibly restricted cell service. She just may not have found a channel for data transmission."

Bruce doesn’t want to be handled, protected from information out of deference to his connection or his condition, so he tamps down the fear, keeping it from his voice. "Her priority is getting the girls out, not herself. If passing on data won’t advance that goal, I doubt she'll take the risk simply for self-preservation."

"Let's hope that doesn't leave too many surprises."

Rogers should know better. She's always gonna be full of surprises.

"I know you haven't seen her work, not like this.” Maria stands, shifting to rest her hand on Steve's shoulder. “Infiltration and manipulation, gauging the stakes--no one is better at what she does. When this is over, I’ll tell you about the first time I met her."

~*~

There’s a class for coding, a surprisingly practical skill taught by the teacher that Natasha had disliked at dinner. The computers are hooked up to a server mainframe in order to test their code, and so far, outside of private offices, it seems like the only option for getting information out. Natasha compiles a few lines of code in her head, to be sent out into the net toward one of the places JARVIS is monitoring, a dense packet of references picking out options from the a la carte list she’s already put in place.

She just needs to get into the basement unobserved.

~*~

Barton is behind the wheel but they've been holed up in a box store parking lot for awhile now, just one of many squads scattered around Denton waiting for the signal to move. He’s used to the fraught boredom of even the most harrowing operation; he's come prepared with talking points and a playlist. Steve’s riding shotgun and Bruce is at one of the tactical stations in the back, the screen gone dark from neglect.

"You need to be exposed to some music that won’t make you seem like a grandpa. There’s only so far you can take it before you sail right past hipster into the uncanny valley of Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.”

They've been working their way through Rush's Prog Rock years, so the argument is more entertaining than the music. "I like music I can dance to."

Bruce is irritated, worried, and wants someone to take it out on, but Tony is stashed in another direction. It's pointless to try to jab at Clint, who takes everything with this low unflappable amusement, and it's unfair to poke at Steve. Tempting, but unfair. He bangs his head back against the side of the van. 

Barton asserts, "You're never gonna get laid with that crap.”

"Why is everyone so interested in my love life?"

"Why aren't you interested in it?"

Barton makes a fair point, and Steve can only clench his jaw.

"Ayude me, mi capitan," Bruce mutters.

"Learning a new language keeps your mind fresh,” Steve explains, “and I want to talk to the guy who runs Morena’s."

Barton rhapsodizes briefly on the brilliance of _Moving Pictures_ as he cues it up, then circles back to the benefits of talking dirty in another language.

Bruce takes pity on Steve. "I don't think anyone is concerned about where you put your dick, Steve. What’s concerning is that the only people you talk to outside of us are the guys at the taqueria and the ancient vets at the Elks club."

"That's not true,” Barton counters, “I'm actively curious about where you're gonna choose to put it. The world is literally your oyster in terms of pussy. Or dick. Both, frankly. You're a perfect specimen and you represent noble self-sacrifice. I'm trying to make sure you don't blow that opportunity. And I know you're still probably gonna fumble under all that. Hence, the education."

“This is not education, Barton.” Bruce can’t let that assertion go unchallenged. "If you're getting laid because of Rush, you're clearly using some sort of voodoo."

"I got game, Doc. Don't need voodoo."

Bruce acknowledges that's probably true. And equally true, no one hassles Hawkeye about his extracurriculars when he spends less time at the tower than a neighborhood stray. "Still, can we listen to something else, anything else, for just a few minutes?"

"Ha, try being holed up in a studio flat for a week with a cranky Russian nursing a broken arm, a bullet wound in her left ass cheek, and an obsession with the Eurovision Song Contest.” Clint shudders from the elbows on up, “Sure Sweden had moves, but Bosnia-Herzegovina sent a coked out Draco Malfoy.”

“Irrelevant. I know for a fact I can’t hack _YYZ_ right now.”

~*~

After breakfast the second treatment is shorter, but worse. Natasha doesn’t have to perform the dread or resistance, she simply emphasizes it to give veracity to the moment just past noon when she opens herself up like a smashed pumpkin. She lets her body go lax and twitchy, lets the memory unfold for Madame, for herself, the moment she broke through for more than a heartbeat. 

She sees herself showering off blood in a Paris suite, towel and a dust of powder, step into the satin lined dress, step into the expensive heels. The muscle memory of putting herself to rights, while her mind races to keep its place in the moment.

She’s determined to hold the memory, to know what she’s done. She doesn’t dare sleep for days afterward, and she loses track of where she spent all those hours--but she holds on to what she did, the orders she took and the actions that followed. She’s ashamed. But she moves forward.

Madame lets her surface, handing her a towel when the room resolves around her again. “You were always stubborn,” she chides, but it sounds like praise. “You first bent into the skills we gave you, then bent them to suit you. It made you better.”

It made her broken, but it gave her a way to get out. 

The treatments leave her shaky and uncertain. They scramble up memories that she has to spend time afterward piecing back out, re-placing herself back into the moment at hand as much as possible before moving out into the school to shadow teachers per Madame’s direction.

She’s still flashing back and forth a little, hasn’t recovered as well this second time around, and her body temperature is chaos, shuttling from feverish to shivering on a whim. She’s being watched, by the girls who look at her with compassion and disgust and a careful blankness, by the staff who see her as more of a mascot than a peer. Certainly by Madame, who is determined to squeeze as much intel from Natasha as possible, and is still deciding if there will be anything of use left afterward.

Natasha needs to get into the basement, needs to find a way to transmit some of the info she’s gathered. She doesn’t care if she’s caught, as long as it’s after she’s hit enter.

She’s been given a room in the staff corridor where she can be monitored, plain furnishings but a fine handmade carpet echoing the one in Madame’s office. She lays out on it in shavasana, using whatever she can to keep herself present. Things That Help. She runs through all the various ways she knows how to say _fuck_ , thinks about her favorite meals and favorite books, remembers the oddest hotel rooms and the most eclectic weapons she’s used, and keeps her thoughts as clear as possible of the people she loves so that none of _this_ can touch her memories of _them_.

~*~

The floor of the tactical van was just as uncomfortable as it looked. Each of them had all taken a two hour shift sleeping on it. While Bruce had fitfully napped Steve had practiced some of his Español on a food run, coming back with migas and an assortment of piping hot breakfast tacos just after dawn.

Early morning North Texas looks as unappealing as middle of the night North Texas, but now with the addition of a flat, ugly humidity and the tinge of something electrical and threatening in the air.

Steve waits until they’re done eating before he confirms, mouth set hard, “Still no intel.”

The deal Steve had finally agreed to was that they’d go in regardless--controlled extraction of their asset in the field and management or containment of the others--but he still wants a hard deadline.

Hill’s voice comes out of the radio, sounding almost bored, “How much time do we give her, you think?”

Cap’s steady, solid gaze makes Bruce feel sick. He waits.

Barton stretches his arms above his head. He’s intent, but even more assured than Maria, and Bruce wonders what it’d take to visibly rattle him. Spies, he thinks, fucking spies. 

“She’ll let us know,” Barton says, flat but utterly confident, “one way or another. But we’d best be ready.”

~*~

When Natasha rises on the third day she takes a long moment to sit on the edge of the bed and focus on soothing the tremors so that they aren’t visible. She can tell something has shifted. The air is staticky and electric, and there’s a fierce sense of anticipation buzzing through the students.

She joins the faculty for breakfast and sees the girls are out of their regular school uniforms. They’re decked out sleek tactical shirts and pants, sturdy boots with flexible soles, any long hair severely braided or knotted back.

Madame and a few of the older girls are missing.

“We have drills once a month,” says the Mandarin teacher, who had been designated her chaperone for the morning. “Usually, they’d be on Friday, but the weather looks bad and we need to use the field, so Madame has moved them up to today.”

Natasha has given her team three days to get into place. She knows that she hasn’t given anything away to Madame in their sessions, but they’ve speculated about the outside forces funding the school. You can quietly mobilize a group of superheroes and a paramilitary LEO initiative, but you can’t do it in a complete vacuum. It’s possible that someone dropped the dime.

It’s probably best to go speak with Madame in person, but she is not in her office when Natasha steps through the door, and the hallway is empty when she comes back out.

Natasha pauses for a heartbeat, considering the reasons she may have been left unsupervised, and determining her best route to the nondescript door off the atrium that leads down into the basement.

~*~

The computer lab looks like it was cleared out during a class, and Natasha spots a machine that is not only connected, but has an email program open. Screw code. She dumps the string of high priority indicators into an email and sends it to Steve, copying Tony with a keyword JARVIS will flag, and she has to crouch down from the wave of relief when it goes through. She opens up another email, dumping more intel and sending it off, working her way from need-to-know down.

She deletes the sent emails, and something catches her eye...the computer teacher’s corpse in the far corner, garroted with an ethernet cord so severely the trachea gapes open.

She reaches to click compose once more, but sees Madame step into the doorway in her peripheral vision. 

On the screen she sees two bounced email notifications pop up in quick succession, as a dart stings in her side.


	12. Chapter 12

Natasha comes around fairly quickly, but then it doesn’t look like they needed to take her very far because underneath the hard soapy scent of antiseptic the room still has that faint dampness that the computer room did. The nursing office upstairs is Norman Rockwell cozy, but this room is more familiar to her. Though it’s new, freshly dug basement and bright white tile and even the grout still gleams almost all the way to the floor drain, it is so dreadfully familiar. It feels wrong and squalid and smaller than the one she remembers on a different continent, in a different century.

She feels a disconnected pang for Harvey, who really did a wonderful job with the tile, which is a serviceable white but climbs halfway up the walls with a herringbone precision reminiscent of his snappy two-step.

The room is a lab first, and an exam room second; counters and sinks, work stations and an eye-wash basin, fire suppression, a fume hood, even a wheeled blackboard that has been hastily washed clean. There is a stack of linens and a hamper, an array of equipment stored on metal racks, cabinets and hutches, and at the far end is an exam table like any doctor’s office.

Natasha occupies the focal center of the room. The padding of the chair is unyielding and easy to clean, as is the thick leather lashing her to it at several points. Being strapped down makes it easier, takes away a few layers of pretense she was having a hard time tracking by this point. Madame has donned a lab coat that is tailored and spotless.

“Natashenka,” she tsks, vexation warring with the kind of indulgence one gives a growling kitten. 

She finds herself channeling a Stark-like braggadocio, speak of the devil and he doth appear, bringing her cavalry with him, “Lyuda.”

It’s reassuring that the gloves are off, that she’s become one of the girls again in Madame’s eyes. Now Natasha will learn by doing.

~*~

_“Sir, incoming email.”_

“Seriously? JARVIS, are you broken?”

The email comes up on his phone anyway, a salad of code and references ostensibly from fygrumpykat@gmail.com but clearly from Romanoff. “And there’s our emergency flare--cross reference with the strategy subfolder of the Esposito file and push to the tactical team.” Tony snaps open the briefcase and lets it fall to his feet to begin unfolding.

_“Done, sir.”_

“And JARVIS, send an NDN reply so it looks like it bounced, she may need the extra CYA factor.” He steps into the maelstrom of metal that forms around him. “Reference mailer-daemon@elwood.com.”

~*~

“Incoming,” is Ameena's only greeting as the lab door swings open.

She’s not only in tactical gear, she’s also got on shooting gloves and glasses, weapon sighted down along her left leg as she sweeps the room, “Combatants confirmed. I’ve dispatched two strike teams to keep the evacuation routes clear, and await your instructions for deploying the balance.”

“Your analysis has been gratifyingly correct so far, Ameena.” 

“Thank you, Madame.” Ameena bows her head, but her eyes flick to Natasha’s feet, and the girl is undoubtedly studying her in her peripheral vision. “I suggest evac down the rat hole.”

Madame keeps to her work, “Do continue as you see fit. Your performance will be evaluated based on retention of soft assets safely to the new location.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“A priority will be to keep this room secure until I have finished.” Madame turns to Natasha. “The insights here are worth the losses.”

“I will secure this room, Madame.”

Natasha tracks the muzzle as it rises, sights, and fires in a smooth motion. Natasha watches Madame fall gracelessly to the carpet, and it feels like the top of her own head has come off. For the first time in perhaps decades, she has absolutely no idea what expression she is making, and this is the reason she turns back to Ameena, to try to read it on the young woman’s face.

Ameena is aiming at Natasha, and Trinh has at some point snuck into the room to cover her flank from the side.

Natasha has lost a lot of the filters from her mouth, so she breaks into ringing laughter and says, “ _Brilliant_ analysis. So what are you going to do with me?”

Ameena doesn’t reply, just throws a hand signal behind her. The door is shut by someone outside. 

Ameena tells Trinh, “Push the plunger on the IV.”

~*~

The sky looks terrible, and for once it’s not Thor’s fault. Bands of thunderstorms keep coming from the west like barreling train cars, and while they can’t hear the weather sirens going off in Denton proper, NOAA is pushing cell phone alerts like a panic.

No rain yet, but the wind is stirring up dust like muddy water, and that’s how they see the shield go up around the campus, as it fries a billion dust motes in a shimmer in the deepening gloom.

The collective mass of ground support takes a big psychological step back at the sight, recoiling at the notion of this having turned into a siege in Texas.

Hill comes over comms. “Utility verifies that part of the grid is still dark, so this confirms they’ve got a hefty physical plant onsite. Initial scans of the building didn’t show anything, so I’m thinking below ground.”

Stark takes to the air to run a deeper scan, analysis he’d developed for the SI crew in Franklin to map the jumbled mess of the grid from the air. The ground is a few meters of rocky clay--high mineral content and almost as hard to scan as to dig--over a thicker layer of limestone. It’s going to take some time to get anything like a picture of what’s going on under that damned school.

~*~

“Cap.”

Steve’s head snaps up at the combination of deliberate and grave in Banner’s voice.

“I think it would be best if you gave me a mission. To have in my back pocket in case…”

Steve nods. Better to go into it with a plan, than be pushed into it without one.

Stark comes over comms, “Do you think he’s any good at moving earth? I know for damned sure he likes electricity. If he can take down the generators, we can get in.”

“I think…” Bruce follows a wisp of memory, sparks flying out of his fist sharp like lemonade, “I think he can smell it, actually.”

“Just make sure you go down at an angle and then come up through the subfloor, don’t bust into the side like the goddamned Kool Aid Man.”

“Tony, he’s not really good at physics.”

“Caught me from orbit.”

“That’s outfielding and you know it. Maybe if I had a visual...I’m mainly going to be focusing on not hurting people.” Bruce has a visual for that, a beekeeper refraining from crushing any of his hive, it’s what got him through both times at the proving ground. “I think it might be better if I head away from here entirely--”

“There’s always Veronica--”

Bruce’s rebuttal is hot, “We are NOT testing Ronni in this scenario--”

“Knock it off.” Clint decisively cuts through the escalating chatter in a way that Steve is always deeply impressed by. He does it with a normal tone of voice that still somehow brooks no argument--which if anything, in this crowd, might be Clint’s superpower. “Stark, one test at a time. Banner.”

Clint waits until Bruce meets his eyes, then he raises his eyebrows delicately and speaks in a soft voice which is out of character for being devoid of any sarcasm, “We’re in Texas. You remember, back in the day, when that girl fell in the well?”

Bruce had graduated high school that year, a toddler had dropped deep into a bore well and it had been one of the first real media circuses, days of drilling and digging to sink a parallel shaft through the rock to come up under her, so as not to crush her where she was encased. He nods.

“Good.” Clint continues in that weird hypnotic voice, almost melodic. “Babies inside the rock. Come up from underneath. Snuff out the sparks.”

Bruce nods again, taking it in, and everyone goes quiet for a long moment as he toes off his shoes and pulls his t-shirt back over his head, a hard distant look in his eyes. He pads off across the scrub in the direction Clint points.

They watch him go, Hill murmuring, “That was beautiful Barton. Let’s hope to hell it works.”

Steve’s eagle eyes narrow, troubled. “When did Banner’s back get all scratched up?”

Barton looks at the sky, and heads off like he left the stove on in one of the tactical vans.

“I’ve told them all, I need to know about any injuries before we go into the field, and it’s not like Bruce to…” he stops as Hill stares at him out of the side of her eyes. “What?”

“Repite: arañazos amor.”

“Amor?” The penny drops and his befuddled expression breaks into a blush that looks almost painful. “Arañazos are scratches, aren’t they.”

“Si, muñequito.”

“You know, I looked that one up. People might get the wrong idea if you keep calling me dollboy.”

Hill’s response is dry, “Will they?”

~*~

Bruce is sick of waiting, pulled tight with dread, and seeing a shield go up around the building had only made the rage itch inside of him. Three days, and he’s in Texas, and he did everything she asked of him and this is supposed to be the extraction and there is no more patience left in him to abide.

He scuffs his foot into the dying summer grass, scratchy over hard pack. Tony said a meter of rocky clay, and then solid limestone, but that’s of little regard, it might as well be sand castles and styrofoam. He goes over the images Clint gave him, thinks about the hot lemonade spark of electricity, and lets his bitter resentment of the situation overwhelm him.

~*~

Natasha feels like the grit inside a pearl, jagged and dirty and wrapped inside layers that bend and smear the light.

Ameena has pulled a lab stool over and sits close, like a handsy dentist. She isn’t speaking because Natasha is speaking, Natasha is free-associating worse than Stark, and Ameena is taking it all in. What had she even been asked?

Natasha is telling her about staying awake for days, until everything bled together like wheat and chaff thrown into the wind, all the while keeping her eye on that one piece of information--the name of the mark she’d just killed--because that would be the key, that would be how she’d steal her own mind back.

Oh, Natasha thinks, listening to herself: alternate mental states and reality testing. That’s okay then.

The questions reverberate back into her conscious mind after she’s already answered them. Why did you come back? Did she do this to you? What does killing feel like to you? What do you want with us?

~*~

Stark had changed to the Hulkbuster in part because it seemed like the proper precaution in a worst case scenario, and in the best case he could assist with earthmoving and shoring up the tunnel.

Despite the progress they’ve made in developing the heavy artillery protocols, the Hulk is still not a team player at heart, so when he starts scraping into the North Texas clay with fingers like a backhoe, he doesn’t clear it away from the hole like a ditch digger, he just works himself into the earth like a badger.

~*~

Trinh’s voice is clean as a brass bell ringing through fog, “Peyton reports all targets have been neutralized.” 

Natasha tries her best to track Ameena’s reply. There’s an evac tunnel that surfaces on another property, the students called it the rat hole, and Ameena had sent about half the kids into it when she first came down to the basement. Now she’s trying to send Trinh, to tell the group at the other end to hit the highway, but the girl is having none of it, small cool hands taking Natasha’s pulse as she calmly argues with a nearly grown woman who tops her by a foot and a half.

“I think we need to revise the plan, I’ve been saying this for days, ever since she came and gave us the diversion we needed. You’re not taking all the factors into consideration.”

“This is not the time, you have to tell them to go, Trinh. I don’t want them caught if the uniforms decide to widen the search.”

“Ameena, listen to me--we’ve taken down the really dangerous ones, we have a chance to all walk away from this--”

“It’s time to wrap this up the way we planned. I’ll follow you--”

“I’m not stupid!” Trinh rounds on Ameena. “You never intended to follow me! You’re going to go down with this, aren’t you? You’re going clear us out, drop the shield and take all the murder charges on your own stupid head--”

“I’m _responsible_ , Trinh--”

“SHE IS!” Trinh pulls her subcompact and fires another round into Madame’s corpse, maintaining eye contact with Ameena but dead-on accurate in her extreme peripheral vision.

Ameena sits down on the stool, unfazed by Trinh’s outburst but dispirited that she can’t seem to send the girl to safety. “And what do we do with her star pupil?”

Trinh turns back to Natasha, considering. “...I don’t think she ever was.”

The storm must be worsening outside as well, a long roll of thunder rumbling through the walls of the lab.

Trinh’s eyes remind Natasha of Tony’s, large and saturated black, hungry like a tar pit. Natasha feels the anxiety and nausea swell, her pulse pounding in her ears, and knows Trinh has pushed a little more drug into her system. The lights already feel like hot spikes in her eyes, and now the colors themselves look wrong, as if the mellow soprano of the girl’s voice is shifting the vibration of light itself.

“Madame thought you came here to take the school from her.”

“She was right, and she was so very wrong.” Natasha doesn’t even wait for the question, she just opens her mouth and starts briefing them on their own file.

There are no layers to track, no edits between her memory and her mouth, and it frees up enough of her brain to study them both, bleary-eyed as she is, to read enough of their reactions that she gets good value back for the information she’s dumping. Trinh’s hand on the syringe and the inducer is distressingly nuanced for a weedy fourteen-year-old, her questions aimed at defining the options left for any of them outside the shield.

These two have been working the long con for over a year, Ameena as the aide de camp getting special tutoring from Madame in security and tactics, Trinh as the gifted-among-the-gifted with a keen interest in the medical piece. They’ve been working on harm reduction, proving loyalties, recruitment, soft sabotage, and an eventual coup d’etat that Natasha catalyzed by being the perfect diversion for Madame. 

Ameena had insinuated herself into Madame’s good graces to accomplish much of this, and Natasha can fill in the blanks on what she’d had to do to accomplish that--Ameena was planning the sacrifice play in large part because she believes she’s earned the punishment. 

Finding out the uniforms outside know about the enhancements--this is what gets Ameena to listen to Trinh.

Maybe they were better off rounding up the balance of the kids, hauling down the rat hole and hitting the highway, disappearing as best they could. There were a handful of questionable merit they could leave on campus to keep the uniforms busy, while the two of them led the evac into the sunset and made a life somehow. They would need Ameena, to keep ahead of the people chasing them.

The pounding is not just in her ears. Trinh says, “Earthmovers.”

Ameena slowly turns her head to triangulate. “They’re headed for the shield generators.”

Natasha keeps talking, trying to tell them about the Foundation, the resources she’s pulled together so they can make their own choices, all those things she didn’t have when she fled Madame that she wants to give them here and now and fuck Clint and his hush little baby song how could something so hackneyed suddenly feel so true?

~*~

Everyone’s in place, just waiting for the shield to go down. The occasional radio check-in does nothing to break the suffocating hush of brownian noise; wind and aimless thunder and the infrasonic sensation of a subterranean Hulk undermining bedrock.

~*~

Trinh interrupts, "I don't speak Russian."

Natasha stops, tries to backtrack, "My people are outside--the uniforms--they're with me, they don't want to hurt any of the students. We want to help--"

"Another scholarship," Ameena scoffs, distracted by the grinding vibration of the earthmovers. 

"Genuine opportunity, not this-- _nothing_ like this.” Natasha chokes on the disconnect, on how to bridge that gap of comprehension when she’s only clinging to the here and now by bloody fingernails and the piercing stare of Trinh, “This is something I survived, something you’ve survived, but this is over.”

Ameena stalks back to loom over the smaller girl, “It _will_ be over once you head down the rat hole!”

She has to look almost straight up. “I’m not leaving you to do something stupid. We had a deal.”

“I came through. And you kept your promise.” Ameena seems to deflate. “You told me you didn’t want to do that anymore.”

“I don’t. But I’m not letting you do it, instead.”

“They won’t kill me.”

“They won’t want to kill any of us. We’re valuable. But it’s still suicide.” Trinh turns her eyes back to Natasha, yanking her back. “Tell me, what kind of opportunity _does_ a weapon have?”

Natasha leans toward her, not sure if she’s trying to breathe her way around nausea or sobbing, “We _are_ weapons, Trinh. But so’s anyone who knows how something’s put together--engineers, doctors, they all know how to break something beyond repair. No matter where you go, you’re all gonna have to decide what to do with that.”

“So why go with you?”

“You don’t have to go with me. You can come to me, whenever. I can be the alternate plan in your back pocket. All I ask is that you try to learn how to play nice, wherever you go.”

Ameena inquires, “Like you play nice?”

“I build more than I break.” Natasha looks up into her eyes, willing her to understand, “I renovate.”

The digging is audibly closer, thrumming up from the floor. Ameena nods to Trinh, draws her weapon and goes to investigate the sound.

Trinh is contemplating the strap holding Natasha’s wrist down tight, little spidery fingers playing with the buckle. “You talk like you’re getting out of this room alive.”

“If I don’t...the offer still stands. Go to New York, Avenger’s Tower, ask for Steve Rogers. Tell him, ‘beloved junkyard dogs’. He’ll keep my word.”

There’s a bellowing roar that resounds from behind and below the walls of the lab for so long Natasha breaks out in shivers, whites out for a moment from the throbbing in her head, and comes to again before it stops.

The lights go out in a moment of blessed relief.

Another generator kicks in with a flicker, revealing Trinh fumbling the strap loose, panicky--but evidence that her primary instinct is to give Natasha a chance to flee. Natasha leans over her arm, fascinated like watching a chick peck out of a shell, and she wants to hug the scrawny kid close, squeeze the breath out of her from vindication and pride.

Instead she seizes the first moment one wrist is free to snatch Trinh’s gun and level it at the girl. “Rat hole--now!”

Trinh darts away, slapping at the dial of the theta-inducer to cover her escape.

Natasha’s scalp feels like it’s crawling off her skull and she bangs her head back against the chair, swearing, “Dir’mo!” like a chant as she sweeps her free hand back behind her head to try to catch the wires and yank them free before the wave sweeps her under.

~*~

Once the shield goes down Clint borrows Stark’s aerial view, riding the Hulkbuster suit like a dragon and reading the scene out for Cap.

There are already casualties--so far they all look like adults--and evidence of vicious home turf fighting.

~*~

Even the tweens and teens are compact death in their school-issued tactical gear. It’s disconcerting, the soft round cheeks, bright eyes, and tied back hair topping scaled-down commando gear.

Steve has stopped thinking of them as children since three of them ambushed him and he ended up hitting one of them with his shield, hard enough to jolt his elbow, and the girl dropped, rolled between his legs to escape, and landed a punch upward on her way through.

There’s a definite division: runners darting like rabbits, fighters sniping from cover, and a few who seem undecided, looking for leadership. But the ones fighting, a group of older girls mixed with couple smaller ones, seem to be doing it as home defense and not because he seems specifically threatening.

"Jesusfuck,” Stark takes a barrage of high caliber fire from both the east gallery and the southern wing’s roof, and Steve’s glad Stark already dumped Hawkeye on top of the northern wing. “It's like the end of _Charlotte's Web_ up in here--"

“You can really tell the ones who’ve had team sports.” Hawkeye has that bland tone he gets when most of his brain is parsing and aiming. "The rest are easier to pick off individually."

Romanoff hadn’t exactly forbidden the use of sedatives, but she had expressed doubt that chemicals would have a helpful effect.

She wasn’t wrong. They’d started with a bunch of vicious, angry mallards. By the time they take down enough to get into the building they’re facing off with drunk, vicious angry mallards, stumbling and still punching, some of them sobering up disturbingly fast.

“Maybe we just herd them somewhere,” Barton suggests. “Some sort of holding pen. How many can fit in the van?”

“Pretty sure making them listen to prog rock is against the Geneva convention.” Steve can’t help carping, still stinging from the romantic intervention and then finding out that he really was the sole Avenger who couldn’t get it together on that front. “Esposito said she had a paddy wagon parked with the ambulances.”

“We’re in,” Hill confirms over comms. “Heading to the basement. It’s pretty cleared out so far. One body in the hall. Adult. Math teacher looks like.”

When the tornado sirens go off, it just seems to Steve like they’re another piece of musical theater, klaxons from above harmonizing with the howling all around.


	13. Chapter 13

Natasha has a gun, and she is speaking fast and low in a polyglot. Her speech is stuttery, self-interrupting. She has no visible injuries, but her eyes are nearly black and generously rimmed red. Lead wires dangle loose in her hair, and there’s a saline lock placed in the crook of her elbow.

Hill spreads her hands out wide, easing into the room. “Tasha.”

Natasha brings the gun up to cover her and goes silent, twitchy all over except for a solid line of one planted foot leading up to a finger on the trigger. The corpse at Natasha’s feet has been arrayed in repose, lab coat buttoned and fly-aways from the bun, loosened by a large exit wound, smoothed back from the forehead by bloody hands.

Esposito’s whisper comes across comms, “I’ve got a shot from the hall, we can ice her and evac to medical--”

The I.C.E.R. hasn’t yielded spectacular rates of survival in delicate humans, particularly when mixed with any other chemical reagent and it’s clear that Natasha is in an altered state. And if she’s non-standard human? Well, you don’t piss off the tiger in the bush, you just stay still and try not to look like prey. Plus, there’s that nasty sense betrayal that accompanies shooting one of your own. Even for a good cause. 

Maria makes a split second decision. Thinks like a spy: effective asset management and retrieval. 

"Negative."

Esposito’s "Sir?" is a pause for clarification, and Hill knows the woman’s two seconds from firing and hauling her out in a fireman carry herself.

Hill broadcasts across all comms. "Get Banner."

~*~

"Oh sure," Tony dodges a chunk of limestone flung with casual accuracy as the Hulk swaggers away from the hole in the ground like honey badger don’t care. "Let me just knock on his door and ask if he can come out and play."

Hill somehow combines cold and precise into something more effective than loud, “I don't care if you have to sacrifice a _white goat_ to the _angry god_. Fucking. Get. Banner."

"Well, shit."

Tony’s read the documentation on the protocol, the psychological underpinnings of the theory and the minute analysis of each time they’d successfully retrieved the man from the monster. If anything, it’s the opposite of reassuring because he understands he’s fundamentally the kind of guy who escalates a situation without even trying. As Pepper has pointed out, shouting “Relax!” is not an effective strategy in any situation.

He opens the face plate.

The sound alone is enough to catch the Hulk’s attention, and that is not comforting. “So, hey, ahh...I'm your backup, man."

The wind has kicked up and single sheets of rain sweep sporadically, sluicing mud from massive shoulders like washing a boulder clean. The scowl turns into a sneer, dismissing deliberate idiocy, "Red."

"Yeah, I thought as much." Tony’s nose itches from the rain dripping off, but he suspects trying to scratch it with his arms still in the Hulkbuster would be a bad idea on several fronts. "Listen, man...she's at the office."

His eyebrows crumple together and he looks back at the campus, consternation and the edge of action.

"Nonono!"

He whips his head back around to glare at Tony.

Screw strategy and psychology, Tony is not above just opening his mouth and letting everything out, begging, demanding, cajoling, daring, something’s gonna stick to the wall, right? "You did your job--you did well, there's a bonus in it for you. She's wrapping up hers, but fuck, man, we’re all a team here. We’ve got a goddamned rota for dinner, you think we can get away with making her bat cleanup?" 

The low rumble Tony had mistaken for thunder is actually coming from the Hulk.

Tony licks his lips, rainwater salty from flop sweat on his tongue. "The Other Guy needs to get to work."

Yep, that rumble is a growl all right, but Tony’s not great at keeping words in when he’s already got them cued up.

"Yeah, I know, you’re not a fan of his work in general, so you’re thinking, let the lazy fucker sleep on the job, we’re better off, right? But Red’s got a problem for him to solve and we all promised we’d pitch in on this one. I, for one, am not prepared to find a safe place to sleep if we disappoint her. We need to wake up Bruce."

Tony mutters to JARVIS a solid stream of commands, countermands and dire profanity, and the Hulkbuster suit opens and spits him out onto the ground like pitting an olive.

The Hulk crouches down and leans over him, and it’s like being under a propped up SUV and hearing the jack emit the whine of metal fatigue. The enormous face closes the distance and sniffs him for fuck's sake.

"Come on, man, we need the Other Guy too. Please."

~*~

Renata takes point just outside the door, and Maria stays put under the barrel of the gun, which is a Beretta subcompact almost swallowed by Natasha’s solid two-handed grip.

And they wait. 

Maria doesn't talk about their first meeting, when she finally came face to face with the woman who had dismantled a fair number of their best operatives. She'd expected to look into the dead eyes of a stone killer and had instead found herself face to face with a short, serious redhead with clear green, guileless eyes who could cry on command. She had flirted outrageously with Maria and then offered her a tip on choosing better boots for the uniform: it was all about the instep. She had also lied to her, spinning a story about her past counter to every file they had, and even knowing they had to be lies, Maria found herself taken in.

Later, she watched surveillance footage of Romanoff's fight with Barton, the aftermath of the hospital incident in Amsterdam and the non-classified portion of Fury's debrief with her. It left her angry, resentful, but then she stepped away from her expectations and decided, grudgingly, to get to know the real pieces of Natasha as they started to surface.

Maria’s been part of a regimented government organization since she was twenty-one, always swimming upstream against the sexism and dismissal pounding at her for daring to be young and female, the casual racism she was sometimes expected to share with people who assumed she was standard WASP.

Watching Romanoff take those slights and twist them to suit her was enlightening. It never got old--nor any less disconcerting--to watch her shift from hurt, frightened victim, tears welling in her big, expressive eyes, to the quiet, controlled, polite operative giving nothing away, not even a smile. 

The combination, the fluid manipulation of such extremes, the effectiveness of that flexibility? Terrifying. 

Maria can tell from the blood spatter that Natasha was close to the shot that took out Kudrin, but hadn’t delivered it. She has no doubt that given a reason, Natasha will dispatch her in a heartbeat.

It's a stretch to say they're close, but they're friendly. Maria admires her skills, likes her insight, and was frankly awed that a woman who filtered everything through the lens of self-protection chose to make herself so vulnerable by releasing the SHIELD data. Even if it did mostly ruin Maria's life.

But respect and trust are different, and Maria lives a life amongst spies. They all hoard emotions and secrets like closet cannibals.

Stark sends a holler across comms for Thor, “He’s gotta go make a house call, and I can’t carry him.”

Banner was a dark horse. The doctor was pathologically reserved, unfailingly polite when silence wasn’t an option, and on rare occasion so adeptly sardonic it betrayed what was probably a constant running commentary buried deep. 

It was surprising to find out that the two of them had somehow worked their way into each other’s pockets. She’d come by the tower to meet with Steve, on the pretext of discussing intel but also to start teaching him Spanish, and she’d come across the two of them sharing the desk Stark had set up for Romanoff in the work area he referred to as the Avenger’s typing pool.

Romanoff's face was open, amused, looking down at Banner from where she stood more than a shade too close, straightening his collar. His laugh was loose and low, and almost didn’t sound like his voice.

Maria scuffed her sole on her next step, not wanting to startle them. Natasha had moved away from him, and gestured to Maria to follow her.

"I'll find Steve," she'd said. 

"I'm going down to lab," Banner interjected. "I'll walk with you."

Maria had glanced to Natasha to share a communicative look, but it was like Maria had disappeared, for both of them.

“ETA inside of five minutes, Hill.” Stark’s out of breath, “I expect a big tip; I live off gratuities, you know.”

~*~

The upside is that the rain washes off most of the clay, and the driving cold impact of it cuts through the postictal debility, the downside being that Bruce is cold and wet and he can’t quite parse anything around him in real time.

His head is pounding, and staying conscious feels like keeping his grip on something hot and poisonous. He’s being half-carried by Thor and Tony into the school, and that seems very wrong not only because their disparate heights with Tony out of the suit are pulling him at odds like mismatched dogs fighting over a toy.

It’s wrong because he’s supposed to stay away from the babies in the rock, and they’re taking him right into the building and down into the basement--if he’s got worst case scenarios that don’t involve him trashing whole cities, this is pretty high up there on the list.

Hill issues clipped furious orders that reverberate off the tile of a bright white lab. Tony and Thor still clutch his arms, twitchy as all fuck. He’s in the center of chaos, tornadoes in the air, lodged like a bomb in a bunker of killer, compromised children. He’s so tired, feels like he’s still buried in rock, his brain seized up in dense clay.

And he doesn’t give a fuck about any of it: Natasha stands in front of him, feverishly alive.

What keeps him from rushing forward is not the gun or the spray of blood across her white shirt, or the body on the ground. It’s the absence in her hugely dilated eyes, the hurt and confusion evident even with all the edges blurred from his myopia. He can’t let her suffer through that alone, but he’s going to have to think this through.

It’d be nice to have a shirt, some shoes, his glasses maybe. But more than anything he just needs to make sure she keeps the gun on him, needs to keep her from hurting anyone else, most importantly herself.

“Natasha,” he says, trying to clear his focus, trying to be as gentle as possible. 

Hill orders, “Cut the audio--” but he slashes his hand behind him to shut them all up.

“Get out,” Bruce says. “Just get the fuck out.”

Natasha swings the gun, sweeping them all, but he walks forward slowly like it doesn’t bother him, to draw her attention and cover their exit.

Hill unclips her radio, pulls the battery, and sets both on the ground before closing the door. No surveillance, just a lifeline.

“You’re not going to shoot anyone,” he says softly. “Just keep pointing it at me though, sweetheart. I can take it. It’s gonna be okay.”

She swings it back to him. 

“That’s good.“ He feels the twitch of the Other Guy’s attention, and runs through a quick catalog of her symptoms to kick his logical mind into gear. Shaking, panting, flushed despite the dank chill in the room. “But you know, if you shoot me, it’s gonna go ugly. I could hurt some people, these girls. Your friends. You. And I don’t want to do that. I never, ever want to do that.”

He doesn’t think his words are processing, but the tone is somehow tickling something in the deeper recesses. She’s listening to him, and that gives him something to work with.

Whatever she’s been given is running riot in her system; an acetylcholine blocker at the very least. Chemicals aren’t enough to fully unseat her, but they’re going to be wreaking some serious havoc regardless, shoving her hard into fight or flight, hell she probably can’t see worth a damn with her pupils blown. The leads trailing out of her hair are seriously disturbing him.

“Natasha, can we turn the lights down?” He moves slowly, backwards steps toward the row of switches near the door, and eases them down one by one until there’s only the bank of lights by the work counter at the far end of the room. “Yeah, that’s better.”

She tracks him with the gun, but at this point it seems more like the involuntary aiming of a cat’s ears, so he steps closer to where she stands shaking in the gloom.

He needs to give her a place to focus, a thread to follow through the labyrinth. All he can give her is herself. It has to be enough. 

~*~

Natasha is awash in hotel rooms and train stations, her hands full of steering wheels and silk ties and the familiar Hogue grip of her Glock, the meaty scent of blood and the smoky vapor of bourbon; names, she needs to track down the names, she needs to retrace her steps like she did all over Europe, she left the vipers’ nest and spent the next six years chasing down every shred of memory, disappointed (relieved) when they were false and gratified (disconsolate) when they were true; she needs to find another target, money for searching the next city on the list and another clean complete memory to plaster over the foundation of rubble--Venice is built on tree trunks pounded into the silt centuries ago, petrified into ersatz bedrock--

\--she is seasick, and she never gets seasick, she has spun and spun like a child’s top so why does her stomach roil--

“Natasha.”

\--the reflex of sighting is what tells her she’s armed, and that’s soothing, that tamps down some of the crawling fear, that she can pin down the shapes in the glare and keep them away from her, keep them from changing her, she’s the only one who rearranges herself, she chooses her targets and she choose her traits--

\--they keep calling her name with American vowels, and she doesn’t mind, not really, because it tells her where to aim the gun--

\--she doesn’t want to fire it, doesn’t think her head can stand the sound of it, she can taste blood in the air and her palm adheres to the grip with blood gone tacky, and this is not right, it isn’t her gun, she didn’t bring her gun because she flew commercial; airports and cockpits and stepping out into thin air with the promise of the ground long minutes away--

“Natasha.”

\--the jerk of the chute deploying, the terminal velocity of freefall snapping down into a leisurely drift, hung between sky and earth and she can already smell the mud and stone, focus narrowing down to the sole body left in the room to cover, and the blinding glare eases bit by bit, the pain in her eyes receding enough for her to see and--

\--she can’t think of him, she can’t think of any of the pieces of home she’s cached like she used to cache currency and documents, and before that, scraps of memory; but the presence of him floods, intrusive, the timbre of his voice and the rough silk of his hair caught in her fingers, and the ache in her chest is high-pitched because she can even smell the scent of him underneath the mud and she can’t break, she can’t let any of it come out of her mouth--

\--she keeps the gun up by default of habit, but she lets him come closer, because why, because of the why, the lack of sense in it, the same kind of mismatch she’d followed all over Europe, the big picture broken apart by the details…

...she could not let herself be comforted by any thought she didn’t want to slip out of her mouth...but...

...there is nothing comforting about him right now, in his post-Hulk uniform of track pants and mud, the pained squint, the tremor in the open hand he’s stretched out toward her, the thready crooning of his voice bouncing hard off the tile and she picks up that thread, tunes into the sound of it like a beacon and tries to follow the words...

~*~

He’s close enough now to reach out and grasp the back of her wrist, something in his chest loosening, just a little, at the contact. Touch, connection, grounding in a storm. Her skin is hot and dry, tremors in the muscle tone from the chemicals burning through her, and he says her name, more noiseless words of comfort, stroking his thumb over the back of her hand.

Her skin against his is the key to this, and he moves closer, talking low, coaxing her back.

“You pulled a gun on me the first time we met. I know you remember that. I scared you, wanted to call your bluff, but you called right back. You let me see how fucking terrified you were, and you didn’t stand down. I came with you because I felt like an asshole. I scared you deliberately, and then I hated myself. I never wanted to be that guy, who got off on that kind of power.”

The tremor has progressed to a shake, and he’s not sure if the sliver of gold around her pupil is better or worse, or simply clearer to him because he’s finally closer. He can’t stand the heplock or the leads anymore, so he reaches slowly with his other hand.

He doesn’t touch the gun, which is close enough to smell it’s been fired, but is aimed just over his shoulder. Putting it down has to come from her.

“I’ve never seen anyone like you,” he methodically pulls the tape and the catheter from her vein, “I’ve watched you work so hard, put this together, put yourself together. Put me back together. You’ve built a home, a family. Given me a home--a weird home where we’re basically living in someone’s rec room, but you know...You always do the thing that scares you. I know you can do that now.”

She folds her elbows into herself, fresh smear of blood in the crease, and he steps in further, slides his other hand up to cup her shoulder, smoothing the crook of her neck, soothing strokes on her nape, circles at the base of her skull, tangling in her hair.

“I need you to come back. I’ll cop that it’s selfish, but I need you to come home.” He plucks the electrodes free from her scalp, dropping them onto the tile floor, the hardened gel another layer of grit under his nails. 

He can feel the muzzle of the gun against the bare skin of his belly, can hear the other guy’s nervous roar rattling in the back of his head.

“We did what you told us to. We came. Pulled it together, and it’s an absolute shit storm out there, but your intel was solid, and we got through. Even the other guy did his part, and Tony stood in for you, but I really don’t want to do post-change come down with him. He’s pushy and I know he’ll hog the bed. Plus, I had to stay in the van while Clint introduced Steve to Rush. All of Rush, even Caress of Steel. We still made it, came through, kept the babies safe.”

His face is wet, but he’s not willing to take his hands away from her. Her arms fall, and he follows her down as her knees buckle. She drops the gun as she sinks, and he stops paying attention to the weapon.

“We’ve rounded up a bunch of the girls. Steve’s wrangling them like a mother duck.”

He needs her to touch him, to reach out and feel the circuit complete. He takes her hands, sticky with blood, and curls them together against his chest. He wraps his arms around her, saying her name over and over again. She’s broken out into a sweat

“This is just chemicals, just your body fighting back. All those things they did, all those things you survived, I know it hurts, I know this feels bad. But your body is fighting back. Let me help you do that. This isn’t permanent. It’s gonna get better.”

He needs more contact, more skin against hers. “I’m in the woods here, Natasha. I need you to take the lead. I know you left me a list, but you need to come back, make sure we do everything on that list. Take pointe class with the girls, scare Tony, keep me from being stuck in a van with Clint and sixteen hours of Geddy Lee’s tenor again.”

Her focus is starting to return, and she looks at him like she doesn’t know what she’s seeing, can’t tell truth from lies, past from present, but she sees the sticky darkness on her hands and pulls away.

He knows that’s bad. He looks around wildly and spots an emergency shower in the corner by the door. He hauls her up--surprised at her compliance, but he presses the advantage, slipping his arm underneath her shirt to encircle her back, getting as much contact as he can, pressing his heat into her now clammy skin.

He guides her under the shower as she drops her hands to her sides. He unbuttons her shirt, pushing it off her shoulders to the ground nearby. “I’m so sorry sweetheart. This is going to be cold.” He pulls the handle and yelps as the water spills over them, and he scrubs the blood from her hands, her face, her chest, shutting it off and squeezing bloody water from her hair. Her lips are pressed together against something, and he’s prepared for a sob or a scream.

Instead he hears her gasp and stutter out his name, low and agonized and questioning, like that’s what she’s been holding back until she just can’t anymore.

Her eyes are clearing, and he pulls her forward, crushing her to him. Her arms wrap around him, and she starts to shiver so hard he doesn’t know what else to do but hold on. 

~*~

The moment Hill calls for Banner, Rogers’ team shifts gears. A standoff means the need for minimum safe distance. 

“Evac protocol,” he orders. He’d promised her safety and containment of assets. That’s what he’ll deliver. “I want this done right, and I want it done well!” 

His team is well trained, and despite their unsettling targets and the threatening skies, they conduct one of the most thorough and speedy building evacuations ever seen, giving the attempted stand-down in the basement as wide a berth as they gave its counterparts back at Franklin. 

The ankle-biters are in the damndest places, but they find about half of the number Romanoff had given in her email, and make certain the building is clear.

Steve suspects the rest scattered off-campus early on, since many of the rooms looked like clothes and shower caddies had been hastily packed.

The remaining eighteen are gathered, detained, or contained as necessary, and Esposito gets busy putting the spurs to the med team to finish triage and take the whole circus offsite to work on intake.

It’s three in the afternoon in June, and they’re losing daylight fast.

The next clump of thunderstorms is a supercell that pelted Ponder with baseball sized hail, and is now lazily rotating to the west like a towering meringue spinning in a dessert case.

~*~

Rage and sweat mix with the scent of fear and mud and blood. Bruce smells like junkyard leaves burning, but underneath that, the hollow of his neck smells like home, and Natasha breathes that in, lets it calm her. His skin under her palms is the most solid, real thing she’s felt in days, and she can’t imagine moving.

She’s not sure who’s shaking harder, but she’s sure they both need to sit down before they fall down. She feels like she’s breaking up through ice, struggling to punch her way free to the air. She can only focus on one sensation at a time, but everything around her feels prismatic and fractured. Too many treatments, too many chemicals, and how will she ever put herself back together?

Time shifts. She pulls back, and can’t figure out why he looks so filthy and broken. They’re in India, she’s been sent to secure his help. Fury claimed to want only the man, but she knows that gleam in his eyes when he scores a twofer. Still, he doesn’t tell her anything that will make her lie. She finds she doesn’t want to lie to Banner, doesn’t want to see betrayal on his face when he’s looking at her with this odd compassion.

Her stomach lurches, and she lets go of him, graceless as she turns to vomit over the shower drain.

His hands are cold, even if his skin is still throwing off metabolic heat, and he holds back her hair as she retches, keeping her steady so she doesn’t fall, kneeling with her on the tile.

It’s New York, and he’s wearing a stranger’s pants but his diffident smile is just for her, right before the world rips apart. Again. For the better part of an hour. She thinks it’s nice that he kind of apologizes for trying to kill her. She can’t remember doing the same.

Vomiting clears her system, at least a little, like the ice has finally cracked around her. He steers her to the eyewash station so she can rinse her mouth, and she takes him in.

He’s a mess. His eyes are glassy, like he’s coasting through a migraine, auras all around and his skin is waxy and pale. Estonia, but Thor missed the monster and hit the man with that alien hammer. It looks like it hurt. She's gaining an awareness that her timeline is still fucked. 

“Shit,” she says. She’s weak, shaky, and they’re both leaning hard on the eyewash sink. “Clint’s wrong. You have more than a few questions.”

He puts his hand on her face, thumb sweeping her cheekbone. Since when does he touch people? But it feels so good that she leans into it, leans into him. His mouth tightens, lips colorless and expression bleak, and she really, really doesn’t want to be the cause of it.

“I think I might need to close my eyes,” he says as they roll back in a flutter of white, “Just for a second or so...” In the space of a heartbeat he swoons limp and she falls with him, and it’s all she can do to catch his head from smacking the tile.

She sees the radio, picks it up and slots the battery in. Hesitates, then slides the gun toward her. She scoots back against the tiled wall and gathers him so his head is in her lap. She reaches down to the fierce itch in her ankle, set to wiggle another bone chip free, but she’s not in her jumpsuit, they’re not in the quinjet and her ankle is fine when she touches it. She curls her arm around his back and pulls him up closer until his hot head is pillowed against her stomach, which is when she realizes she’s just in her bra, her skin is wet and goosebumped, her shirt discarded a few feet away. She holds him tight with one arm, her other hand on the tile next to her, halfway between the radio and the gun. 

She needs to know what’s happening outside. She needs to know what’s happening inside. She combs her fingers in his hair, nails against his scalp and she knows it feels good because she can see this look on his face in her mind, hear the deep sigh that would come out of him if he weren’t blacked out.

She closes her eyes, remembering his hands on her body, his voice arguing in a low, pitched beat with her, his laughter against her skin, his fingers stroking the arch of her foot, his mouth opening under hers. She tightens her grip on his hair. 

She breathes out his name. Natasha starts to fit herself back together in the shape of who she knows herself to be.


	14. Chapter 14

“Rogers.”

The voice is ragged but deliberate, and it cuts through the chatter for a long moment before Steve answers, his own voice thick. “Romanoff.”

“Sitrep.”

“Yessir.” And he lays out the situation in clipped phrases that belie his burning curiosity to ask her the same damned question. It’s just her and Banner in that building--that they know of--but it’s been quiet and he’s gone back and forth over whether that was a good thing or a very bad thing.

It’s when she responds with, “Roger that, Rogers.” that he feels justified in asking, “And the Doc?”

“He’s gonna take a little nap now.”

~*~

She doesn’t bother to look up at the sound of scuffling footsteps, just raises the Beretta, but doesn’t take her other hand away from Bruce. She’s sick of interrogations, and this school, and fucking around. She’s ready to take her toys and her scientist and go home.

Best case scenario, they walk out of here in a few minutes and spend all night tying up paperwork with the local organizations who have been drafted to wrangle kids and teachers and fallout. Debrief and provide services.

But she has yet to encounter a best case scenario, and she’s determined to let him rest and reset for as long as possible. She’s prepared to shoot on sight.

The sight that greets her is Trinh holding Ameena up in the doorway, which seems like a poor choice based on their heights. However, the soaked, bloody pant leg and fly by night tourniquet around the older girl’s leg tell a very specific story, and Natasha hopes it’s not one of her people who shot her. There are three girls behind them, huddled close together like angry, terrified mice.

Natasha sighs, lowers the gun, gets Steve back on the radio. “Cap,” she says, “We need timely extraction after all.”

She hears a tightness in his voice. “Well, the weather might have a different opinion.”

"Mellie spotted a tornado from the roof.” Trinh says, losing a little of her grip on Ameena.

Her sympathy for Trinh has skewed slightly following the vomiting and nearly shooting someone, but the girls collectively look more like children than they have since she arrived at the school. The little ones in particular tug at her, peeking from behind the cover of Ameena. 

“Miss the bus?” she asks, unable to keep the sardonic tone out of her voice.

“Who’s he?” Trinh sets her jaw, and suddenly Natasha is just so weary, and she knows there’s so much more work to do. 

“He’s a lucky break.” She shakes Bruce’s shoulder, says his name softly. Gestures with the hand holding the gun. “One of you, go get a towel.”

The tallest of the girls darts to a cabinet with linens and Natasha continues to try to persuade him awake.

He finally opens his eyes. She helps him to sit up, wincing at the tremble in his arms. “So, this is weird.” His voice is gravelly, and his eyes dart back and forth between her and the girls, taking in the tableau, looking down at himself. “And kind of embarrassing.”

She can see him rallying, wishes she didn’t have to force the issue, but it’s clear that Ameena can’t keep standing, and Trinh can’t keep holding her up.

“Doc,” she chides, voice sharp. “We’ve got a gunshot wound.” 

His attention snaps to her, then he takes in the rest of the room as he shakily gets to his feet.

In the interest of full disclosure, she continues. “And possibly a tornado.”

The duckling most likely to be Mellie counters hotly, "Definitely!"

“Of course we do.” He starts ordering the ducklings. “You: get the lights on, then cover that,” he points to the corpse on the floor, “I don’t care with what. You two: help her onto the bed, get her leg up higher than her heart.”

The tallest duckling approaches with the towel, and his voice is gentle, “Go press that on her leg, I’ll be there in a moment.” He turns back to Natasha as he heads toward the sink, “I’m sorry about the lights. Are we secure here?”

Natasha looks the question to Trinh, who nods, face grave, “I took care of it.”

“Delightful.” He’s scrubbing up past his elbows, and even soaping his face and hair, jamming his head into the sink to rinse off the sweat and grime. Natasha fishes her shirt off the ground, puts it on, hands him another towel, and sets a box of gloves on the counter. “Be a dear and bust into the med cabinet. I’m not making any assumptions about biology if there are supplies at hand.”

Natasha begins prying open drawers and doors, throwing likely supplies onto a nearby counter. The other two ducklings have lined themselves along the wall, but they look unarmed and physically unharmed and so she leaves them be for now. 

Ameena is on the bed, but watching propped back on her elbows with her legs dangling off the end where the tallest duckling dutifully presses the towel to the wound through her calf. Bruce pulls out the extra table length at the end and gestures her to lie back, “We need to elevate it over your heart--”

“You don’t look like a doctor. You look like a sasquatch.”

“You have no idea.” He gestures to the twist of bloody shoelace working its way loose at her knee, “But that attempt at a tourniquet is doing nothing for you right now, so make your decision quickly.”

Trinh reaches up and yanks Ameena’s shoulders down. “I can start a line, if you need one.”

"No," Bruce is rattled by this, but he shakes it off. “No, I think we’re okay right now. Come here.” He stations Trinh at Ameena’s hip, “Loosen her tactical gear and lay your hand right here,” he indicates at the crease of his own thigh, “keep an eye on her femoral pulse. Let me know if you stop feeling it, she might be getting shocky.”

They wrap Ameena in blankets and prop up her leg, and in lieu of proper first aid scissors Bruce has to use Ameena’s tactical knife to remove her boot and sock. He has to work close, without his glasses, and Natasha sees why he scrubbed his head clean just in case. Once the footwear is off he just applies direct pressure with the towel and keeps running through a circuit of checks.

Natasha squints and shades her eyes to read off medication names until Bruce raises his hand and asks Ameena, “Any allergies?”

Ameena looks smaller bundled in the blanket, and she’s snaked one hand out to cup Trinh’s elbow as she continues to monitor her pulse. “No.”

“We have a winner--but let’s keep it in our back pocket if evac doesn’t come soon.” He turns back to Ameena, “You let me know if you get cold, or hot, or queasy.”

Trinh snaps at him, “That’s all you’re going to do?”

“We’ve got ambulances just outside, and the local hospital on alert. She’s stable, the bleeding isn’t arterial and it’s slowing down, so we’re waiting for the weather to clear.” Bruce scratches his cheek against his shoulder, and his question is pitched as one professional to another, “What kind of training have you had?”

“Madame taught me how to assist.”

“I see.” Bruce’s eyes flick to Natasha, “I’m going to add some real medical training to the curriculum Tony and Thor have been putting together.”

“Is that what they’ve been doing? I’m surprised Tony didn’t put anything in the file. Or choose a mascot. Or make t-shirts.”

“Thor didn’t want to jinx it. And he was adamant that the students should choose their own symbols.”

Ameena’s voice is strained as she complains, shivering, “You said it wasn’t another scholarship.”

“I said no such thing, Ameena.” Natasha tucks the blanket between the young woman’s shoulder and ear. “I only promised it was real.”

Trinh shakes her head at Bruce, who stands and raises Ameena’s feet higher. With a look from him, Natasha heads out into the hallway with the radio to light a fire under evac.

They swamp her on the stairs.

~*~

“I know you hate Texas,” Thor bellows over comms as Barton drives a tactical van stuffed with middle-schoolers through a volley of hail the size of eggs. “But the weather here is more invigorating than anything else in Midgard!”

“Welcome to Tornado Alley; glad you’re getting a charge out of it.” He carefully guns the engine to goose the van up the wide stairway and through the double doors Thor has thrown open, driving right into the atrium cum parking lot already half-filled with ambulances and a hodgepodge of law enforcement vehicles.

He throws it into park and kills the engine, ducking between the seats to start herding kids out the back. “All right everyone knows the drill, down to the basement, chop-chop.”

They move efficiently but he keeps an eye on them. They’re squirrelly, some of them still resentful and punchy, and the weather and the evac has everyone at sixes and sevens.

He sees them dart in a brisk line to the left, and spots Natasha. Something unwinds a little in his own chest. She gives him what he suspects feels like a smile, but looks like a grinning death mask, eyes dark pits despite the bright fluorescent lighting. When the last kid gets into the room, he puts his arms around her and hauls her close for a few heartbeats, kissing the top of her head. That she allows this betrays her fatigue.

“Damn, Nat,” he grins at her. “You look like hammered shit. I’m really glad you’re alive.”

~*~

The basement now holds an actual Lozen Family Reunion.

Agents are strategically peppered among the cacophony of pissed off, frightened, and in some lights creepy, kids. Several knots of medical teams are working on the injured, including Ameena.

Hill, Rogers, Esposito and even Thor are handling the inevitable interagency goatscrew. Bruce reflects that Tony was right about Thor being preternaturally good at calming people, for a guy who seldom uses his indoor voice.

Barton’s pulled out a deck of cards and is hanging out with the older girls, doing the terrible close-up magic that’s phase one of his favorite busking con.

Stark comes up to Natasha, and she has enough in her to refrain from assessing her handiwork on his face, but aside from meeting his eyes they’re both weirdly quiet. Tony pops a chest compartment open on his suit, and pulls out a small roll of cloth. 

He silently hands it to her with ceremony, taking hold of her shoulders and placing a delicate kiss on each cheek. He still sports a butterfly bandage on his own. He pulls another roll out, unfurls it with a flourish and flings it over Bruce’s shoulder. Then he hares off to the server room to jack in like R2D2 into the Death Star.

Bruce feels like his viscera are vibrating, everything redlined and sputtering on fumes. He puts on the t-shirt, which is a heathered forest green _PS I <3 You!_, but is clean and smells faintly of the laundry in the tower.

Natasha looks horrible, still in her damp button down, pupils still wide open, her face washed out colorless except for her hair in gritty hanks and the sockets of her eyes prominently dark. She clutches the roll of cloth in one hand, and Bruce takes the other, their fingers reflexively slotting together in the particular way they fit best.

“Any good nurse’s office will have crackers or juice or something. Let’s see if that holds true for evil ones.”

She turns to him and murmurs, “You‘ll be hungry…” and he makes a shushing sound because the last thing he wants is for her to rally again to try to take care of him.

She’s shaking her head and trying to lead him to the stairs, and while the barreling winds have abated some, the all clear hasn’t gone out yet. But she’s inexorable; because she’s always going to be able to generate more ATP than he can outside of the rage; because it’s likely she does have some kind of plan, even if it’s a bad one; and because he wants to go with her, even up the stairs into the battering storm.

The atrium he’d passed through earlier in a fog is now lit by half-light and filled with vehicles, but they pass through in a beeline to the back of the building, to a large office set in the nexus between wings. She pushes him inside and closes the imposing wooden door.

Bruce takes it in, teasing, “You’ve brought me to the principal’s office.”

She replies, “Sideboard.”

There’s an embarrassment of pastries, butter and jam, and a hefty silver samovar. Bruce doesn’t even make a decision, his body moves forward on its own, “...and I was hoping for peanut butter crackers.”

“Tea’s probably still hot.” Natasha strips off the button down, her boots and her bra, and dons the t-shirt Tony had given her. This one is also bloodstained, a sprinkle of permanent brown marks on one shoulder from an inexpert washing. Tony has further scraped off the C, so it now says _REAMING FOR VENGEANCE_.

Bruce washes a mouthful of pastry and butter down and says, “That’s probably the most appropriate gift he’s ever given anyone.”

“It’s from Pepper, too.” She tosses throw pillows onto the thick handwoven rug, then moves to one of the windows, “It’s been tailored to a woman’s cut.” She grabs two fistfuls of velvet curtain the color of dusk and yanks it free, spreading it out.

Bruce stuffs half a poppyseed roll into his gob, watching her tear down another swath of velvet and drape it around herself. She’s as wrecked and glorious as James Brown being coaxed off the stage bundled in his own lame cape.

She says, “Come here.”

He does.

~*~

Three of the youngest girls are sitting in front of Thor, rapt. Hill watches as he regales them with the story of the Ouroborus. Everyone had needed a break from assigning blame and responsibility, and she’s got her feet on a chair, studying a minor god as he charms a handful of assassins-to-be.

He sets Mjolnir on the ground, and lifts each of them up as they struggle with the hammer. She winces, knowing that even at eight there’s a part of them that will always be fighting against the after-effects of their time here. It’s hard to think clearly about the older girls, and she thinks of Natasha on that first day. Composed, quiet, yet in retrospect brimming with the aftermath of all the death she’d dealt, all the people she’d been, facing a choice that must have been just as terrifying as her past had been.

Steve hands her a bottle of water, sits down on the floor to watch.

“We’ve made all these plans,” he says, mouth in a stern line she’s learning means that he’s working through a layer of complexity he didn’t expect. “But they’re still kids.”

Maria drinks her water, nods.

“How do we just let them walk back out into the world?”

Thor’s tale finished, the big-eyed little black girl turns to the milk blonde standing with her elbow propped on Mjolnir like a fencepost, and says, “Mellie, tell him about Lozen.”

The blonde makes a show of reluctance and Thor plays along, cajoling her that he truly does want to hear the story of the name of their school, until the girl begins her tale with the loud correction, “It’s not a school’s name--it’s a warrior’s name. She was a great warrior of the Apache nation when it was under siege.”

This, of course, is total Thor-bait. “Then Mellie, you must tell me all about her.”

Mellie is clearly the kind of born raconteur who blossoms for an audience, and Mjolnir is a decent sub for a microphone stand for her to lean dramatically around. “Even her own brother--and some of us remember how brothers can be--even he said she was a better warrior than he was. He called her his right hand; strong as a man, braver than most, cunning in strategy, the shield of her people.”

~*~

Natasha didn’t think that kissing Bruce could feel like this: reassurance, relief, warmth. Familiar in a way that made her feel lit up. So desperately sweet. Different than the desperation of longing, more like finding the notch where she fits.

His hands cradle her jaw, mouth so soft that translating this sensation into want feels almost illicit. Almost. He tastes like tea and butter, tinny underneath, and she wants a chance to catalogue all of the types of kisses they’ve exchanged, analyze the texture and feel, the import of each. 

There’s an unmoored feeling to her body, her mind, a skittery disconnect from the fatigue, the drugs, the enormity of the day. She feels hazy and unreal. He tugs at the hair at the base of her skull, and she can feel some of that tension vibrate out of her. She moans against his mouth as the quality of the desire shifts, banks along her exhaustion, rides through her body pleasantly going nowhere. She wraps her arms around his waist, taking the curtains with her, as he tucks her up against him. 

“We should do this,” she mumbles into his chest, “laying down.”

He huffs a laugh against her hair and settles on the floor, stretching on his side as she drops down next to him. He runs the back of his hand in a long stroke from her cheek down her arm, soothing. Callbacks, she thinks, feeling another little flash of the time shift, the tremors, can’t tell if it’s the end of the drugs finally shaking free or her body trembling against him. 

He tugs her closer, and she settles her ear against the steady thump in his chest and doesn’t remember closing her eyes.

~*~

“It’s like the _Wizard of Oz_ here,” Tony says to the pixels of Pepper he can see in his monitor. Something about the basement is giving her image a vibratory quality. He’s unplugged from the server, everything uploaded through JARVIS for later analysis, and he’s welcoming the quiet. “Tornados, munchkins, a dead witch, and Dorothy’s rag-tag crew.”

Pepper laughs in two-second delay, puts her fingers to the screen like she’s touching his mouth.

“Except the munchkins are sporting knives and pitchforks and I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re going to be bringing some of them home like strays.”

Pepper ignores that. “So who does that make you, Tony?”

“I’m the Tin Man, baby.”

She chides him. “You’ve always had a heart.”

“Maybe the cowardly lion,” he says. “Today I tamed a beast with the power of my bullshit alone.”

“You’re mixing up your fairytales, but I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I love you,” he says, and the simplicity of just being able to let it roll out of his mouth still catches him off guard sometimes.

“I’ll start looking into room conversions,” she answers, having started talking during the time delay. “Turning some of the suites into dorm rooms and stocking the pantry...Tony.”

She pauses--and he’ll talk over her voice for an hour, output matching input in high volume interface, but he’ll let her bring him to heel with that pause, “I love you too.”

~*~

They can’t have been asleep for more than an hour when there’s a knock on the door. The nap and the food have driven enough of the headache back that thinking isn’t an uphill battle. Bruce still feels like he’s been hit by a truck, but some of that is relief weighing down his limbs. Some of that is Natasha, body warm and boneless draped half on top of him. He might be willing to never move again if it meant staying like this.

“Banner? Romanoff?” He recognizes Steve’s official tone, and waits for him to come in, not bothering to move, simply cupping her neck and rubbing the nape gently in case she wakes up.

Steve opens the door, averting his gaze. Bruce is amused, if weary. “Jesus, Steve, we’re dressed. You’re not gonna see anything untoward.”

He comes in and looks at them like he doesn’t know what to say, mouth in a flat line. Bruce realizes how young he is in so many ways, only a handful of years between him and the kids in that basement, accelerated into responsibility by the weight of his own sense of justice, Erskine’s serum, and a war he’s still processing. For all his ability to navigate strategy and tactics and teamwork, 3-d thinking about materiel and personnel, Steve is floundering in the messy conflicting pool of adult emotions with minimal guidance.

And the tower was often a showcase of fucked up behavior and reactions, all of them so damaged and flailing on their own.

Except Bruce doesn’t feel quite as damaged anymore. Still a threat, yes, a risk--but different now, with evidence to believe that controls and safeguards aren’t far outlying probabilities, that his margin of safety might be large enough to live inside. Maybe large enough for more than just himself, and that’s starting to feel more like an incentive than a tragedy waiting to happen.

Incentives like the woman sleeping like a rock on top of him with her thigh now draped oppressively across his bladder.

Another incentive is perhaps the man in front of him, the rest of them--each one as difficult and complex as they are capable. When he’d agreed to stay, it was partly out of a desire to hew to the good, partly to indulge in a brief connection as a balm against his return to exile. He’d never thought of it as more than temporary. And now...

“Tony figured out where you were,” Steve interrupts Bruce’s admittedly wandering thoughts, sitting down on the ottoman and propping his elbows on his knees, making the whole thing a little more awkward than it has to be.

“We’ve gotten the all clear to evacuate the injured.” Steve pauses. “I suspect Thor helped out the weather a little. Between the g-men and the teen angst...Some of them do NOT want to be here.”

Bruce sighs, although it means that he’s that much closer to a shower and sleeping in a bed. “Okay,” he says. “So on to Stage Two.”

The next bit comes a little out of left field, and Steve sounds deflated, defiant. “Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me anything?”

Natasha answers, rising up sleepy and grumpy, one hand on Bruce’s thigh, the other scrubbing at her face. “What, exactly, did you want us to tell you?”

“I guess I mean,” Steve thinks about it, “you could have told me...” he gestures, “about this.”

Bruce covers his eyes and laughs up at the ceiling. How would he even describe a bed of pillows and dusty curtains and two battered people who embody the concept of keeping things close to the vest.

“So many secrets,” Steve says, and shakes his head. “We’re supposed to be a team.”

The timber of Natasha’s voice is still raw with exhaustion, her words unfiltered, “I’m held together by secrets, my life...what was done to me, what I did. You _know_ it’s not that simple--how long have you suspected he’s in New York?”

Steve looks sharply at her, and something passes between them that Bruce doesn’t have a part of, doesn’t perhaps need to be a part of. But something clicks for Steve, and he nods.

“But that doesn’t negate us being a team,” Natasha acknowledges. “And I’m trying to be bigger than those secrets.”

Steve looks at her, expression softening, and nods at them both like a blessing. He pulls an eyeglass case from one of his belt pouches and sets it next to Natasha’s boots, and Bruce is struck by that gesture of forethought and care.

“ETD in twenty.” He adds with a sigh, “Providing Barton can get them all back in the vans.”

~*~

Natasha stretches her arms up over her head, muscles still shaky at the apex of the yawn, and Bruce runs his hand up her spine, scratching small circles in the hollow at the small of her back. “You are,” he says, as she turns to look down at him, “so much more than those secrets.”

She combs back the unruly curls from his forehead, “I’m shoring up the foundation.” The texture through her fingers is gritty and stiff like ruined silk. She looks back at the door, thoughtful. Her eyes are full, and its unexpected. “These girls, they had a plan, worked together to find a way out.” Pride, she realizes.

His hand slides around her hip, protective.

“It never would have occurred to me that there was any option but going alone.” Maybe grief.

He keeps watching her, gentle strokes on her skin. “Was there?”

“Not for me, no. We were all too broken.” She shakes her head. “They survived here because they depended on each other. I think, if they’re going to thrive, they’re better off staying together.”

“Teamwork,” he says, softly. “Trust.”

“Steve will approve.” She lays back down in the curve of his arm, knowing there are only moments left.

He rolls her half across him, shifting the throw pillow so she can share.

“I was right about something,” she teases.

“Mmm?” His hand cradles her head, fingers aimlessly soothing back behind her ear.

“I told you four days. And weather notwithstanding, we should be back in New York tomorrow, back home.”

“Three,” he counters, low and serious. She slides a thigh between his, ankles hooking together, slipping her hand under his t-shirt to spread her fingers across his back. “We said three days and you’d be back, that we’d be back to where we were.”

She thinks that the tightening in her belly is something so much bigger than simple want.

“This...it’s not just comfort,” he says, his free hand trailing up her arm. “You asked for three days. Giving you that...it’s your job, and I’m proud of you, and so damned relieved. And it was terrible. But this, here, is something else.”

She shifts even closer, crooking her leg over his hip, holding on, digging in.

“I didn’t think that I’d...” he shakes his head, grappling with the words until he huffs, almost convulsive, stilling himself by brushing his mouth against hers, as if the words could only travel by touch, “ _This_ is home.”

Before, she’d thought she had gotten bigger on the inside because the pain, the threats, her past had gotten so much smaller as she grew into herself. This though, the feeling of expansion, connection, being more than herself, part of something else, grows in her chest, feeling like flight, bigger than anything she could have imagined.

“Maybe,” she says softly, trying to keep the grin from her tone, failing utterly. “It’s time we finally went on a date.”

~*~

The med team has moved on to the two kitchen staff who’d been locked in the walk-in since the training maneuvers had begun seven hours ago, sequestered as innocent bystanders but luckily savvy enough to build a shelter from boxes and hang tight conserving oxygen until an agent discovered a suspiciously large pallet shoved in front of the door.

Natasha is relieved to see Ameena looks better, if still pale, stabilized and tucked into a gurney for evac. 

Trinh’s hand encircles her wrist, and it’s clear no one’s going to tell her she can’t ride along when they get to the ambulance. “Some of the other girls,” she says, “they’re staying here. They weren’t...they were new.”

The girls who had finally snagged enough eyes to kick off the investigation were likely to be the least damaged, most likely to reintegrate.

“We’ve been talking,” she looks to Ameena who nods, looking glassy-eyed but still impressively stoic. “About our options. Mostly, they suck. We want to go with you. They said,” she gestures out at the assembled agency reps, ”we have to be cleared first. The little ones too.”

“Yes,” Natasha confirms. There’s no getting around that. Making an actual accounting of what has happened and will happen to these girls is part of the deal. “But ASAC Esposito is on it...it won’t take long.”

Trinh looks mutinous.

“Hold on.” Natasha digs through the go bag Clint had given her, pulling out a burner phone. She programs in her number. Hands it to Trinh. “If you need anything, call. Anytime. I’ll be there. And I’ll see you soon.”

Ameena takes a deep breath, licking at dry lips. “I want to know how to be more than a weapon,” she says.

“Shut up,” Natasha brushes the girl’s cheek, a quick gesture that leaves them both a little startled, “you already are.”


	15. Chapter 15

The rain pours down in a steady deluge now, the danger of being swept away to Oz or battered with hail having passed. Interagency discipline clicks back into place to pack up and move the whole circus to the Hilton Garden Inn near the airport.

While it’s just a shift from one holding pen to another, the oppressive heaviness starts to fade as a convoy drives away from the school. Even the youngest kids have started to calm down, evening out from shocked silence interspersed with a few inconsolable kids chaperoned by agents, to the subdued diffuse chatter you’d hear after a harrowing field trip.

Awaiting them at the Hilton are a block of business suites, a conference room decorated in the standard demoralizing fashion but wired to the gills for tech conferences, and a mess of takeout.

That it was delivered from several points around the city through the storm, and spread out on buffet tables by a hotel with a working banquet hall, is a testament to the mysteries of Stark’s persuasiveness mixed with the power of the black AmEx.

Bruce has his bag from the tactical van, but hasn’t bothered with shoes. The desk clerk’s eyes elide him entirely as he issues a keycard to Natasha, but he does spare Bruce a kindly nod as they walk away.

He trails her to the elevator, where they stand silently shoulder to shoulder, leaning into the contact. The next ten minutes are characterized by the things Bruce doesn’t do. He doesn’t lay his forehead against any of the vertical surfaces on offer. He doesn’t push Natasha down onto the bed and fall face down next to her--he doesn’t even look at the bed. He doesn’t stop moving his feet until he’s got the shower running.

He puts his bag on the bathroom counter, swaying a little as the water heats up. He takes a deep breath and showers quickly on autopilot, disgusted and gratified by the puddle of mud that accumulates around the drain. There’s even a tinge of mud in the sink when he brushes his teeth afterward.

He digs out clothes and a jacket from the bag, no more wrinkled than usual, and is relieved to find shoes at the bottom, even if he has no idea where his original pair ended up. Hopefully they, like the glasses, will make a return.

He feels like he could pass for a competent human, instead of a muddled disaster.

When he gets out Natasha’s curled up in one of the armchairs, where she’s been peering out at the murky relentless rain. She’s stripped down to just the t-shirt and underpants. Red marks from the seams and rivets of her jeans make her legs look like a photographic negative. “Very professional, doc.” 

He smirks at her, but makes the mistake of looking at the bed, and just stands there struck with longing. Natasha pads over to wrap her arms around his waist, snuck under his jacket. “Just think how good it’s going to feel to get back here with me.” 

It’s possible that he whimpers. It’s not a dignified sound.

“You don’t have to wait for me,” he says, feeling her begin to lean more of her weight against him.

“Go, check in with the med team. And when you get back…”

She lets that linger, and he starts to laugh because it’s such a throaty promise, and he knows that right now the promise is sleep, and he likes that he can feel the joke in her voice.

The conference room is set up in stations. Check in, check out, go to the hospital, go to Esposito’s team. Sit in the corner and drink some chicken soup or hot tea, maybe eat a sandwich or a tamale if you’re up for it. There’s a tight standoff of agents in a circle madly typing and clicking, phones rampant.

He can tell Tony’s been through because they’re wirelessly printing from a row of equipment repurposed from the tactical vans, and from the way the power cables are arranged.

The med team had dealt with visible injuries and only the girls most in need of higher level care were taken to the hospital - the storm caused a lot of damage, and it didn’t make sense to send anyone into that chaos to wait on a gurney in a hallway. Ameena and another student with a broken arm have been evacuated for imaging, bone setting and minor surgery.

The corpses of the faculty were still at the school in a temporary morgue, with a contingent of agents mopping up the evidence for the eventual grand jury scrutiny. Bruce really hopes the social climate of Texas will mitigate in favor of the kids, the last thing any of them needs is to slip into another institutional system.

The last kid at check-in is a girl of about eleven with dark eyes behind round glasses, big ears pinning back dark hair, elfin chin, solemn. She sits dwarfed in an easy chair from the lobby, and takes out the thermometer when Bruce comes in, earning an audible sigh from the PA tapping notes into her datapad.

“I don’t have a fever,” she tells him, annoyed and likely repeating herself. 

Bruce goes for amiable, “Okay.”

“I’m just always warm. Most of us are.”

“This is Marisol,” the PA says. The med team has been given limited information, enough to be prepared for anomalies like temperature and healing capability. The intel stated suspected viral experimentation, nothing about enhancement or genetic manipulation. The onsite protocol is that is that as long as a kid is stable, they’ll be referred to a member of Esposito’s small team for further evaluation and antiviral care through the MSF program put together by Potts.

They hadn’t expected to bring the whole med team down into the heart of horrors, and that’s made them edgy and protective about the kids.

There are two eight year olds sitting in chairs at the conference table playing cards, looking very serious. He thinks they’re playing War but their hands move in rapid fire, and they play in near silence.

“Those two,” the PA reassures Bruce, “have normal temperatures.”

Marisol explains, gesturing with a colorfully striped palm, “You don’t go into the basement until you’re ten.”

The PA does a bad job of rolling with the horror on that one, eyes widening as she updates Marisol’s health record.

“That’s good to know,” Bruce takes the thermometer from Marisol and shoves it at the PA as a diversion. “Let’s get something to eat.”

He’s seen the same kind of bruising on Natasha’s palms when she’s had to improvise instead of using her handled garrott. 

~*~

Natasha has just started the shower when someone knocks on her door.

She actually thinks about ignoring it, ducking in quickly and pretending she hadn’t heard. Instead, she shuts it off, throws on the soft pajama pants Bruce had packed for her--she hasn’t worn them since she failed to get him in bed that first time, oh hilarious--and opens the door.

Renata, flanked by Maria and Steve, nods approvingly when she sees Natasha. “Glad to see you back in the saddle, Romanoff. I’ll never doubt Maria again.”

She waves them in, taking a beat to process why Esposito would want to make clear that they first met in person when Natasha was frankly unhinged.

Esposito sets several datapads down on the table by the window and offers Natasha a formal handshake, warm hands and firm as her gaze. “Damned impressive all around.”

“Likewise.” Natasha decides Renata wants to put her at ease by sharing all relevant information. Analysts, what are you gonna do?

Steve passes by with a banker's box topped with a stack of heavy paper carry-out bags in one hand, his other giving Natasha a quick rub across the shoulders likely just as much to soothe himself as her, touching base. She suspects Steve has a whole speech queued up about justified versus suicidal risks that he’s saving for either just the team (bad enough) or just the two of them (even worse).

“Ren thought it might be easier to debrief now,” Maria says, a pan on her hip filled with two large carafes, cups, creamers and silverware. “But at least we brought food.”

Natasha steels herself, knowing that they’re right. It’s only going to get harder from here on out.

She breaks down the three days as objectively as she can. Recon, response, re-working her initial plan for observation and evacuation. Justification for the hands-on nature of her choices, and her failure to pass along intel save for that final burst. The Hail Mary pass that had gone through after all; Steve shows her his phone. Those fake bounces may have been the reason she was allowed to wake up from the dart, after all.

Natasha lays out as much of the coup d’etat as she could glean, omitting names in certain cases. The time after Kudrin’s death, when she spread her memories out like a rummage sale for those kids, is heavily redacted.

Renata is sharp and focused and the type of solid, smart, tenacious official who is going to make it possible for those girls who can be reintegrated to do so, but some pieces are none of her goddamned business; the offstage actions of Peyton working through the list of targets, Ameena's thwarted plan to take the fall. The fact Natasha had walked willingly into the interrogation, as part of her reconnaissance, knowing that any version of the Red Room is half built in the mind.

Steve keeps staring at her, and she wants to shake him. But it’s not his fault that even now he’s horrified at her willingness to put herself in harm’s way when he sees other choices.

“Why couldn’t you wait for us?” he asks, but he only asks once.

Esposito gets it though, Natasha can tell in her eyes. “Sometimes,” she says, quiet and hard like steel, “With kids, you make choices that you wouldn’t normally make.”

Natasha nods once, even though the choice, if she’s honest with herself, hadn’t been only for the girls. She too, had needed that last lingering glance back into what she’d been, where she’d come from, in order to come through clean, to surface as herself.

“What’s the final count?” she asks, as they wrap up and Renata finishes her notes for the report. “Because I’m pretty sure there’s a bus of them heading...somewhere.”

“Thirty-one accounted for, one way or another,” Renata answers. “The social work team are the best in the country, many have worked with public and private institutions, and all have specialities in child development and child trauma. I started reaching out to them when the patterns I was seeing with the missing kids started to look more Rorschach than Where’s Waldo.”

“Not all of them will have clear memories,” Natasha says, surprised by how thick her voice sounds. “They may not want to retrieve them…” but she doesn’t believe that. “They may not be able to.” She’s pretty sure that no matter how much they know about the modifications and enhancements, it’s not going to help bring back memory and clarity. But then, the new tech had been more re-wiring and softening than a standard wipe. Perhaps, ultimately, that’ll work in the girls’ favor.

“Kids are...surprisingly resilient,” Steve says, voice a little unsteady.

Esposito nods. “They take it in, but often they can work through. I get...that they have had experiences outside of the normal realms of trauma. I also know that talking about those experiences may be complicated. The staff...they’re not collecting notes for legal proceedings or for social services. I promise there will be no notes. They’ll just...listen. If the girls want to talk.”

Renata stows her datapad, finishes her coffee. “We’ll need a few days just to sort out the inevitable bureaucracy, but I promise that the girls will have places to go before the week is out. Real solutions to this FUBAR situation.” Steve walks her to the door and closes it behind her.

Maria massages the bridge of her nose, oddly diffident, and then sits upright to look at Natasha. Her eyes are indigo, a little bloodshot, but strangely kind. “There was a floor safe in Kudrin’s quarters. With records.”

Natasha glances at Steve, still leaning against the closed door, looking down at his shoes. This was not the topic she was expecting.

Maria waits until she looks back, “They’re in Russian, and in code, and frankly, I don’t know what we want to do with them.” She pushes a filebox on the floor over to Natasha. “We thought we’d let you decide.”

 

~*~

Bruce cleans and tightens Marisol’s glasses as she begins devouring a fairly large turkey sub.

Marisol tells him about Luz and Catherine, who also wear glasses despite the shots. About Aisha, who is so smart she doesn’t pay enough attention and so she catches discipline and gets hurt. About Peyton being surprised when she came for Mrs. Gerrish and saw it was done and no one else in class had been hurt. About how she didn’t expect him and the new teacher to be down in the basement, but she was glad they were. About how this isn’t the plan Ameena and Trinh made, but it seems okay so far...

Bruce isn’t sure when she chews, frankly. It isn’t until much later than he finds out Marisol is usually one of those kids who’s seldom seen and rarely heard.

At the time he methodically works through the clues and his own sandwich and just...listens.

He’s absurdly grateful for all those unsettling texts that Natasha had vaccinated him with, so he can sit here with this slight little human younger than his damned jacket who really just needs to talk to someone about anything except the murder she committed a few hours ago.

~*~

Natasha doesn’t want to close her eyes right now, even though she can feel the exhaustion droning in her pulse, debilitating like a drug. She wants to wait for Bruce. Hold on until she can close her eyes when she’s pressed up against him, knowing when she wakes up there won’t be any disconnect.

There’s a souped up datapad in her go bag as well, tucked in like a present. She fishes it out, unlocking it. There’s a multimedia presentation on what Tony and Thor have been working on:

  
**The Lozen Foundation**  


_[Working title, okay? You happy now, Mercy Sledge?]_

It’s indeed a curriculum, but it’s laid out as a buffet of modules from algebra to zoology, from computers to medicine. There’s a quick sketch of dozens of different tracks, even one leading to commissioned officer training in the Air Force. There’s a recovery piece, in which screening is mandatory but therapy is explicitly voluntary. There are internships available at SI and the FBI. There are real, unaffiliated boarding schools for those who want to opt out entirely.

There’s a realm exchange program with a short introductory clip woodenly narrated by Sif of Asgard, describing concentrations in honorable conduct, diplomacy, logistics and scrying the material nature of the universe.

There’s a floor plan for a robotics learning lab build-out in the tower.

Natasha swipes the datapad into screenlock and curls into the arm chair, trying not to hyperventilate.

The tears in her eyes burn like bleach, and taste astringent on her tongue.

She sits with it for as long as she can. It’s midnight. It’s raining still. She texts Clint, _I need to break something_. Waits for the _?_ reply. She clarifies, _in a good way_.

~*~

Breaking into the hotel bar counts. To be honest they could have hustled Tony to order booze, but the itch was more complicated than alcohol. Comfort of old habit, safe irresponsibility, firmly checking out of the uniform and the Job for a night, for a breather. Petty larceny and a buzz were easy damned fixes compared to how it could have gone down, so why the fuck not?

It turns out to be a disappointing experience. The bar’s a small enclave filled with well booze, and a cabinet of moderate brands locked up against employee theft. It takes Clint just over a minute to defeat the lock, less if he hadn’t insisted on keeping his eyes closed.

Clint takes the bourbon and the good gin, a tub of ice, a pitcher filled with tonic and another with soda, and the Rumple Mintz because who the fuck else was going to drink mint schnapps outside of high school? It appealed to his sense of symmetry.

He lets Natasha work the lock on the pool door. It’s warm inside the room, humid like a Texas summer that isn’t trying to wipe you off the map, and the lights in the pool illuminate the room like aliens are landing. Between the open windows letting in the rain sound and the underwater LEDs, it’s strangely peaceful as he pours drinks into paper cups.

Natasha rolls up her pant legs, and dangles her feet in the water as she drinks bourbon and soda. Clint waits her out.

He lounges in one of the beach chairs, drinking Rumple Mintz and gin and it’s disgusting, but interesting, like he’s brushed his teeth with a Christmas tree.

“Rush, huh?” she says, the wet echo in the room modulating the hoarseness of her voice.

“Banner’s a narc.”

“Don’t you need informed consent to do that to someone?”

“Funny you should mention,” Clint laughs. “You might want to be prepared to discuss Albania.”

“You’re an asshole, and Albania wasn’t my fault. SHIELD believed in painkillers for grievous injury--that was a new experience for me. Add in the dancing and the costumes...” She croons into the echo, grabbing the bourbon bottle for a mic, “ _Believe me I just don’t care...if you look away or stare...if you choose to go or stay...don’t believe me, I pray…_ ”

He sips thoughtfully. Maybe it’s the shifting colors of the alien lighting in the pool, but he’s starting to picture the Christmas tree as one of those 1960’s aluminum jobs.

Natasha adds, bottle raised to her lips, “I put _Wild Dances_ on a mix for Thor.”

“You put _Wild Dances_ on a mix for Laura.”

She swirls her feet in the water, takes her time bringing it around. “There’s a whole...plan, in place in New York,” she says. “Bigger than I thought...and it feels right, but it’s…”

He’s been letting her ease into it, but he confirms her suspicions. “Terrifying? Big and probably right, but scary as fuck because it makes it real.”

“They’re still young, and I think...I never thought about wanting to pass anything on. It was never going to be an option.”

Clint drinks some more Retro X-mas, and tries to give her the honesty she deserves. “Sometimes, when I look at my kids, the enormous amount of misery I can create is crippling. But then, I watch them learn something, take it in, make it their own, make it bigger, and it’s such a fucking miracle, and I think…”

He sits up, lounge chair creaking, and looks at her. “Turning out bigger than the people and circumstances that made you? That’s such an amazing thing.”

He’s not just talking kids, and she knows it; she waves her hand at him, because seriously, she’s not a goddamned metaphor, and neither is he.

“They’re young. They’ve got that capacity in spades, hell it’s part of why they ended up there in the first place. And they’re gonna look to you for guidance, to inform their choices. Good and bad. Fucked up, and not.” He takes a drink, sloshing it around his teeth like mouthwash and blowing out as if expecting to see his breath. “I’m not gonna lie, you’re gonna give, and try to guide, and be ignored and listened to in all the wrong places. They’re gonna take, and take it all for granted, and fuck it up, and break your heart. Kids don’t thank you for keeping them from being thugs. That’s just the Job.”

She sits with that, slugging back the bourbon and formulating a response, when the sliding door to the pool opens. Tony claps his hands once with a flourish.

“Voila! I knew the party had to be somewhere.” He is inexplicably wearing garish swim trunks, his crotch exploding with tropical flowers. She can only assume he carries them with him.

She can tell even in the half-light that Stark is punchy as all fuck. Clint just pours a big shot of Rumple Mintz and hands it over. Tony spots a pool lounger in a corner, flicks on a bank of lights to scan the layout of the room, and then flicks it off. In the undulating half-light he navigates by eidetic memory, getting the lounger, launching it in the pool, and then hopping straight onto it without putting himself directly into the water or spilling his drink.

They both watch, fascinated.

“Alright kids, spill. I always knew you were sneaking off and having secret spy meetings.”

He paddles himself over to where Natasha is sitting, and she leans over to ruffle his hair. “Thank you, Tony,” she says, failing to clarify what it’s for, and a little of the manic energy drains out of Stark, like a slow leak easing an over-inflated beach ball.

“It has been,” he says, around the cup against his mouth. “One long motherfucker of a day.”

~*~

You can tell a lot about people by what they pack in their go bags and what they bring to the party. In Thor’s case, both of those things are Asgardian mead.

“I don’t know where he keeps stuff,” Tony confides. “Seriously, I’m getting him a man bag so I can at least pretend he doesn’t have a goddamned bag of holding.”

Thor is also wearing swim trunks, but they match his cape, which he’s also wearing. They all gape for a minute, but he just spreads out the cape and sits on it at the edge of the pool cross-legged, and offers to share.

When Steve shows up in a t-shirt and jogging pants carrying a bag of Cheetos the size of a couch cushion, no one questions it.

~*~

Bruce is the last to arrive at the pool. He slides the door open, still in his rumpled tweedy jacket and shoes. They all turn to take a cue from his mood. He contemplates them for a long moment, fists deep in his pockets, then ambles toward the pool shucking jacket, shoes, button down, pants and socks in a trail behind him. At the edge he takes a deep breath and falls forward into the water like a toppling statue.

He sinks. Of course he does.

Tony begins paddling, tacking toward that end of the pool three sheets to the wind, but Bruce has pushed off the side and swum over to break the surface between Natasha’s knees.

She grins, “Hey, doc,” and by this point there’s an exactitude in her diction that fails to shore up the slurring from nearly a bottle of bourbon laced with a gold Asgardian brick to the head.

“It’s like that, huh?”

A giggle bubbles up despite herself, and he turns in the water to drape his arms across her knees and lay his wet head back in her lap to watch, rapt, which makes her laugh harder. The peculiar honeyed vapor of mead emanates from her breath and her skin. He wonders what she tastes like right now, and if he’d need a liver transplant afterward.

“I’d have Steve drive us home but he doesn’t have a license.”

“I’d get one but you bastards’d just find somethin’ else to ride my ass about,” Steve pipes up from where he’s laid out along the diving board, his Brooklyn dipthongs and syncopation much broader than when he speaks for the country as a whole. 

“Can you blame us?” Clint asks.

“It’s such a sweet ass.” Tony adds.

“Also,” Steve ignores them both, “for the record, I’m not even fuckin close to sober.”

Bruce looks up at Natasha. She shrugs, runs her fingers through his wet hair. “Alien liquor,” she says, “Whatcha gonna do?”

“All we got left is vodka,” Clint declares. “I had to go back for it. But it’s shitty vodka and we ran out of ice, so there’s that.”

“Hand it over.”

Barton leans in to hand Tony the bottle, who then paddles over to pass it on. Bruce takes a swig and coughs, which makes Barton laugh like a lunatic.

One hand now free of booze, Tony nearly capsizes leaning over to rub Banner’s chest hair. Bruce shoves the pool float firmly with his foot.

“Not even for luck?” He gripes as he drifts away.

Bruce drinks another measured slug with determination, then sets the bottle on the edge of the pool.

“I think,” he says, closing his eyes as Natasha strokes his face, his eyebrows and hair, “I’ve had my fill of being drunk in Denton. But by all means, continue.” He’s running the backs of his fingers along her calves under water, and all of it soothes the ache in his veins as the vodka hits his bloodstream.

“I think,” Tony says, echoey and certain, “We should have a toast.” He holds up his cup. They all stare at him expectantly.

“To the band,” he says. “To Jake and Elwood over there, and the rest of us motherfuckers.” 

Steve waggles his cup up in the air, bobbing a little on the diving board. “Illinois Nazis as comic relief,” he slurs. “Brothers in arms.” They really need to get him off of there soon.

“Brothers,” Thor seconds, smiling warmly as if he were the avatar of mead itself, and they all bask a little, “And sisters.”

Tony flicks with one foot and one hand, rotating in place like a quinjet to turn the spotlight on Bruce.

“Jesus, alright...” He kicks a little to nudge his head at Natasha’s belly and she looks down at him oddly soft and astonished. And he’s seen that look on her face before but it’s a naked expression, tenderness exposed. It occurs to him that getting hammered on mead is a measure of her trust in all of them, that they won’t use anything they see against her. “To teamwork. And protocols.”

Tony waggles his paper cup. “Boooooring.”

“Fine, fine. Okay, to country _and_ to western.”

“Better.”

There are extra y’s spilling off her tongue now, little fractal curls around some of the consonants, the only time Bruce’s ever heard her lapse into a non-character accent outside of fucking. “To personalized wrestling spankies for every damned one of you!”

Clint cackles, “Here, here!”

~*~

This time Clint’s already waiting on the plane like a flight attendant welcoming them aboard. He asks Tony, “You debrief Charlie on her Avenging Angels?”

“And the box full of stray kittens we’re dragging home. Luckily the Foundation’s based in New York. I think we’ve even got people working on educational accreditation.” Tony eyes Thor as he boards the quinjet, “Possibly a realm exchange program.”

Clint is taken aback, “That’s either the worst idea ever, or the best.”

Tony shakes his head, “You can’t decide either, huh?”

Clint greets Natasha with a casual high-five and down-low neither of them look at to land perfectly, despite the dark sunglasses she procured the moment she stumbled into Texas daylight with her first ever hangover. “What did I tell you: sloppy and awkward.”

“No one likes a smartass.”

“That is glaringly untrue, especially in this crowd.”

Steve heads straight to the cockpit where Maria is running through her pre-flight, and Clint just lets it fly under the radar. 

 

Bruce turns to him, “Maybe Maria has enough game to defeat the super cockblocking effect.”

“Takes one to know one.” Clint snickers, raising a disbelieving eyebrow, “Fury always had an eye for finding the shockingly resourceful.”

Bruce raises him an eyebrow.

Clint switches to the other eyebrow, suggestive. “But, yeah,” he sighs, “he’s still gonna fumble that right out of the gate.”

Bruce settles into a seat next to Natasha, cueing up ocean surf on his player. She nudges his ankle with her boot and settles her shoulder firmly into his space. He hunkers down flush against her, his hand on her knee, closes his eyes and prepares for take-off.

~*~

When they arrive from the airport Pepper is down in the private level of the tower’s subterranean parking lot. Natasha has always been impressed with Pepper’s ability to combine serenity and sarcasm, even nonverbally.

If Tony had cat ears they’d be perked up in two different directions. “Did I leave the tub running?”

She places chaste kiss on Tony’s lips, spins in place and saunters toward the elevator. Parked in the closest regular space is a dilapidated twenty passenger bus, baby blue and rust, faded lettering along the side stating: ST. MIRIAM of the REEDS - YOUTH CHOIR.

**Author's Note:**

> Much gratitude to FBF for wise counsel, and lightning fast incisive beta that resulted in a whole extra chapter. We asked her for title suggestions and then ignored them, because the working title had crawled under our skin and into our hearts without our noticing.
> 
> On [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/reblog/123345106389/8B75YBZV).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Watching](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6181261) by [Thassalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/pseuds/Thassalia)




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